Orionid Meteor Shower Last Saturday Morning (HD Timelapse Video) The Orionid Meteor Shower this year was a bit of a dud. I was shooting up at 11,000 feet in the White Mountains and ran my camera for about 4 hours, from 10:40pm Friday until 2:50am, well after the moon came up. To see how a much more active meteor shower looks, here's one of my Perseid Meteor Shower videos from the same location, displayed on the Discover Magazine blog, best viewed full screen: Perseids, Writ Large http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/08/25/perseids-writ-large/ I have a number of posts on my blog www.MyPhotoGuides.com * related to night shooting and timelapse videos. Here's one of the more recent ones building on those pasts posts: Create a Timelapse Video of a Meteor Shower http://activesole.blogspot.com/2011/08/create-timelapse-video-of-meteor-shower.html I'm curious to see how an HD 720P video gets displayed on G+. I have a ton of timelapse footage that I haven't foun...
Totally agree. So few photographers do it well--Trey Ratcliff being the best right now, in my opinion, and others would do well to study his technique.
ReplyDeleteYou mean you do not like Soylent Green and Radioactive Red? Those are the two colors most often blown out of normalcy by HDR software and users. I will shut up now because I am guilty sometimes.
ReplyDeleteI love Trey Ratcliff 's work as well and the increased dynamic range. Still I will say "crazy" HDR can be fun if you are going for a surreal look and not necessarily a true representation.
ReplyDeleteClown puke! LOL!
ReplyDeleteWe strive to use HDR to produce as close to photo-realistic work as possible. The biggest compliment we can get is when someone isn't even sure the image is an HDR product.
ReplyDeleteTo clarify, I'm a huge fan of HDR's potential. I've used Photomatix since its v0.9 release. I love the latest release best of all, and I still use it from time to time. However, it seems like many people let the technique control their output, and that seems sad. The definition of art generally includes/requires human intervention (look it up). If you let a single tool or technique dominate your approach or dictate your result, it's fine to like or prefer that, but let's not pretend that there's any partiular degree of skill or artistic merit involved. Like Don Schulte I am guilty of using HDR at times, but when I am done playing around my normal approach is much more in line with Toad Hollow... the successful HDRs (successful images in general) are when people can't tell whether or not HDR was used.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Toad Hollow and Jeffrey Sullivan If we question the use of HDR then mission accomplished using the great software tools we have today! Personally I think that wisely used HDR or exposure fusion is great with other techniques.
ReplyDeleteI think your examples Don Schulte are great. HDR is a tool among others and why not use it the way we want? People who are purists and cannot stand HDR don't know what they are missing. HDR is not the answer to everything but it's use can be very interesting depending of what specific effect or feeling you want to express.
ReplyDelete"Clown puke" is a nice way to describe it. Somebody else wrote that a certain kind of HDR looks to him as if a unicorned had vomited a rainbow on a photograph. I liked that and now use the term unicorn-raibow-vomit myself.
ReplyDeleteAside from discussing the merits of the various kinds of stuff thrown up by clowns and unicorns, I think we can all agree that excessive tonemapping is baaaaad (even though different people will have different ideas about what is excessive). However, I don't want to give this post a +1, only because I want to take issue with the aim of "getting maximum dynamic range from photos".
ReplyDeleteGetting maximum dynamic range from photos using HDR way too often means getting images that have no deep shadows, no bright highlights, and everything seems to be lit by a few MW/s of artificial lights.
I'm OK with dodging and burning selectively to raise the shadows and recover the highlights, but most HDR pictures end up having no shadows at all. Whatever global contrast was originally there has completely been eliminated in favor of local contrast, which only serves to give an impression of super-extra-mega sharpness.
Many proponents of HDR say that the technique aims to render a scene like the human eye (or mind) sees it, and the human eye has a much greater dynamic range than a camera. Well, of one thing I am certain, my eyes do not see the world that way.
I'd rather see more pictures where the important elements are bright and detailed and the rest is dark and soft, than HDR shots where everything is bright and detailed, and nothing seems important. I'd rather see a grove of aspens in the mist, where everything is mostly mid-grey, with splashes of yellow foliage here and there, than seeing everything turned into sticks so sharp and detailed that they poke into my eyes. Don't you agree?
Trey is a great guy, but far far from the best when it comes to processing his work. Most of the time it looks like it's straight out of Photomatix. I haven't used that software in over a year now. I prefer to manually combine exposures when doing things like this. Depends on the kind of subject. Given the chance, I'd rather use my Lee and Singh Ray filters
ReplyDeleteThanks for the thoughtful comments (and lack of rants in any extreme direction). Ugo Cei, you've added a great point which I couldn't fully express in the few sentences I've provided. Once our eyes change aperture all over a scene and have the shadow and highlight detail, we still perceive high contrast with bright highlights and deep shadows, so after HDR it's more necessary than ever to import the "flat" result into a competent editing program and restore a realistic look (especially contrast). That was the beauty of Ansel Adams' work, and the skill that so many photographers could never touch. He'd often work on a photo in the darkroom 12 hours or more, but when he was done, the result would never scream "FAKE!" at you. I'll post a few links to some of my verbose blog posts on HDR, including at least one which provides some thoughts on how to produce the most realistic image that way. I have a set of images over on Flickr which contains many of my HDR attempts (with varying degrees of success): http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeffreysullivan/sets/72157622008543219/
ReplyDeleteJohn Mueller, I would never advocate HDR as a substitute for using prudent techniques to capture a competent exposure, including graduated neutral density "GND" filters!
ReplyDelete