Just to let you know that I updated my main gallery to show off some of my photos a bit better. I have been looking for a Lightroom plug in for a long time and was initially tempted to use the plug ins from the Turning Gate but decided against it when I came across the plug ins on the Photographers Toolbox, see here, as they are a lot easier to use, cheaper and offered the functionality I was looking for.
Please click-through and visit my galleries.
As of today, I will be blogging some of the photos I took at Kinderdijk, the Unesco World Heritage site not too far from Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Just click through on the photo to go to the actual blog entry.
I won’t bore you with the historical background as it is all well documented in Wikipedia, but I do wish to tell you about the fun I had on my photo walk at Kinderdijk. Frankly, I had low expectations and was intimidated by the large number of excellent photos I had seen and was assuming that my interpretation was only going to be a boring copy of the work everybody comes home with. As it turned out, this wasn’t true at all, I did enjoy myself a lot, the place wasn’t too busy and I think it was possible to get some shots I hadn’t seen so far. Judge for yourself the next few days.
One of the things that I do enjoy shooting with my DSLR, and frankly, it is the only thing I do use my DSLR for lately, is the creation of 360° panoramas. I do publish my panoramas at 360Cites.net, please follow the link to see more of my work.
The above panorama is of the city of Zutphen, historically an important medieval city but currently a small town of little consequence which does actually contribute enormously to the quality of life there. Click-through on the image to actually navigate around in it. In this particular panorama, I used three bracketed images for each of the 24 shots I would need for the 360° view with my camera and lens combination and used Exposure Fusion to get a better dynamic range for this image, i.e. the shadows are well exposed while the highlights are not blown out even with the sun in this image. Enjoy!
Am I the only one to find this recent craze with tonemapped photos a disaster? Why would you think that changing the colours of your photo into a low contrast, muddled dark grey makes it a better photo? And don’t get me started on the random halos around the subjects! Can’t you see that these halos are awful!? Am I the little kid who sees the emperor walk by naked who yells: “Your tonemapped photos look like shit!!”?
The worst thing is that tonemapping usually gets passed off as HDRI; it is not the same thing! True, a high-dynamic-range image might need to get some help to display correctly on dynamic range limited devices, but that is not the same as deliberately turning the colours into poo. To me, HDR is very useful to get well exposed shadow areas without blowing out the highlights as even the current and expensive DSLRs still have a limited dynamic range compared to film, so something needed to be done to improve this and HDRI was the answer. But if you really are interested in augmenting the dynamic range of your photo, why not look into a free tool like Enfuse. It’ll blow your mind!
