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27 February 2006
favorite flickr groups/photographers→[More:]
As it says, what are your favorite flickr groups and any particular photographers you have found and are impressed with. After that HDR thread I am obsessed.
Also, weretable, can you or someone else explain in plain english what's going on in those HDR pics? I see that it's different versions of a pic being layered together somehow, but the explanation on the group's page is over my head.
Boring, the simple explanation is that when you take a photograph, the camera can only focus on one bit, and the lighting is calculated for some kind of balance between light and dark.
When you look with your eyes, your focus is constantly changing, and you can see everything pretty well... you look at the clouds, you see different layers and lighting, you look at your feet and you see the flowers growing through the sidewalk. Your eyes adjust on the go.
A photograph cannot replicate that on-the-go adustment of every detail as you would see in real life (why so many people are disappointed when they try to photograph a sky or clouds or an overall scene that looks gorgeous in person, but flat in the resulting photograph).
So, this technique (which is similar to Ansel Adams' processing techniques IIRC), allows you to replicate that auto-adjustment we use in real life. It lets you use the perfect lighting adjustment for each area of the photos which has different lighting conditions. (The white balance for the grass under the tree is done for just that bit; the white balance for the sky is done for just that bit; etc. instead of an overall adjustment attempting to get something "good enough")
Using Photoshop to correct lighting is not as good as simply replacing the dark part with the image of that properly photographed... not losing any detail. So it's more like blending different sections to have a perfectly exposed and photographed image, rather than fudging with the lighting on the underexposed and overexposed bits later.
You take more than one photograph of the same subject at at least two different exposures - maybe only two, maybe ten. As many as you need. Some cameras have a bracket setting that will automatically take several pictures in a row at different exposures. Others you have to set the exposure for each picture. Obviously you need a tripod for stability and non-moving subjects (or slow moving) if you do not want a lot of blur.
Each exposure offers different information and they are combined to form one photo using Photoshop CS2 (expensive and complicated) or Photomatix (simpler and much cheaper). The result may be good out of the box, but is usually really weird looking and needs further editing (in my limited experience of about eight hours of experimenting).
There was a pretty good wiki explanation with tons of good links but it is not coming up for me right now.
(and it's not similar in that Ansel Adams blended different bits together—it's similar in that he carefully attempted to create a photograph that would show all of the different lighting areas... and many "great photographers" actually owe a HUGE amount of their success to extremely talented developers. Developers use their skill and talent to produce prints with the best possible result. We tend to ignore the fact of how much is done by skilled developers toward the final work.)
It seems like I'm constantly finding or being directed toward cool Flickr groups, so I can't even keep track... But today I'm loving the Polaroid and Polaroid Edge groups. I was googling something like "old polaroid" or "yellowed polaroid" or something when I was making this post, and so happened upon them that way. Sure, it's a pretty obvious tag, yet I never thought of looking for it on Flickr before.
This guy did an emulsion lift to a glass bottle. I have no idea what that means, but it looks wickedcool.
This person missed the opportunity to make a totally MetaRoid creation by failing to use a polaroid to shoot this pic.
Not that she needs anymore fans, but I really am amazed by some of Rebekka's photos. Iceland provides some great landscapes to photograph, but...wow, she really pulls it off. Her self portraits are really graet too.
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
photo by ethylene
