A venture over to the dark side

Picture: Early evening light over Mount Diablo from Briones Regional Park, Contra Costa County, California

Two great tests today. The first is this test of the hosted embed widget from my PhotoShelter Archive. (It works.)

The second, and much more significant venture, is more akin to that Anakin Skywalker’s trek over to the Dark Side. This is my very first HDR processed image I’ve posted in public.

I never had a problem with people working to increase the dynamic range of an image. However, I’ve stayed away from the automated HDR processes, preferring to have more manual control. I shot this image a number of years ago, specifically with enough brackets to produce an HDR file. So, today the stars aligned, and an unseen force pushed me to hit the until now rarely touched “Merge to HDR” button.

I’ve seen a lot of bad HDR, and I’ve seen some very good HDR. For myself, when I use the term HDR, I specifically refer to an automated computer process, vs. more manual methods like blends & multi-processed files. And by BAD HDR, I mean some really garish, hyper-haloed, day glo-colored, and mostly unnatural looking shots. I certainly don’t have anything against photographers who process images like that, but it’s just not my visual cup o’ tea. My hope is to keep a more natural look and feel akin to the visual palette that I grew up with (photographically speaking), mostly in look and feel like my old velvia slides.

So will I continue to use HDR. I dunno… we’ll see. (Heard: faint voice of the Dark Side calling.)

And as as footnote to that last ‘look & feel’ comment, I always like to point people to my portfolio and see how easy it is for them to guess which are slide-based, and which are digital-based images.