Day 197- Thursday, September 24, 2009

Day 197:

(Initial Edit - Final image to come...)

The Rose Theatre

Brampton, Ontario

This image is hand-stitched together from three exposures, taken hours apart. The technique is called HDR, which stands for High Dynamic Range.

A camera, unlike our eye, only sees a limited range of tones from pure black to pure white. Whereas we can see detail in the brightest and darkest corners of a dynamically lit scene, a camera cannot. You have to direct it to either capture the detail in the highlights and lose the darks, or vice versa. Anyways, HDR solves this problem by capturing multiple exposures for each end of the tonal scale; ergo (heh heh, just wanted to say that), you get detail in the highlights, detail in the shadows, and a nice mid-tone.

Once stitched together, the image takes on a bit of a graphic/illustrated look that can be quite appealing. HDR today has become a bit of a bane to"artists" however. Cheap, quick programs can perform the task with a high degree of automation and not much of an eye for what is "nice" and what is "too much!" It's become a very trendy style over the last few years, and I'm hoping it quiets itself down to a nice, well behaved style that speaks only when spoken to, and pops up only when really needed.

So, the task of hand-stitching allows the photographer to control how much or how little the effect is applied, and to what areas. Another photographer who stopped to chat while I was shooting this actually said, "Oh, you're doing it the right way," after I explained what it was I was up to. I have to agree, it definitely is the right way - it just takes a ******* long time! It can be pretty fun though, especially because at the beginning, the image looks like garbage, but as it really takes its form, it's sooo satisfying.

Forgive me as the colours aren't exactly as they appeared as I was working, but I just learned today about soft-proofing (I've know about it for a while, but we're only now getting into the details) and how you can only view an image in photoshop with a colour profile for ONE particular output at a time; I was editing it in relation to how the colour will come out in print, not online. It's still pretty nice though, just not as saturated. I'm dying to learn more about this stuff as colour has been a big problem for me.

So, there's the last three and a half hours of my night, plus the three and a half that I stood in front of the Rose last Saturday to get this shot.

Hope you like it.

Hope my teacher likes it more!

Goodnight!