THE TRUE MEANING OF COMMITMENT

Only two defining forces have ever committed to die for you:
Jesus Christ for your soul and
The American G.I. for your freedom.

Monday, January 19, 2009

Amaryllis In Bloom


This Photo was taken with the Nikon D90 in manual mode at 1/60, f5.6 using the SB-800 off camera through a 32 inch translucent umbrella. Picture control was set to Vivid with sharpening set to 9 and and hue and saturation set to zero.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

High Dynamic Range

It is about time that I returned to the purpose of this blog by posting something that has to do with photography. I have now used my Christmas gifts up to the year 2042 by acquiring the new Nikon D90 DLSR -- truly a magnificent camera. I take courses given my Scott Kelby at (www.kelbytraining.com).

A new class on High Dynamic Range (HDR) given by a terrific photographer and teacher, Matt Kloskowski teaches how to take a photograph (actually three are required) that captures image detail that would be lost (blown out) normally. The technique requires three exposures, one for the shadows that blows out the bright part (high-lights) of the image, one for the bright part of the image that hides the details contained in the shadows and one in the middle.

As you can see in this image of our living room, the clouds through the window are clear and well defined while the interior of the room is well lighted and balanced with the view through the large window looking due east to the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The procedure is somewhat complicated, at least for me a new-be to digital photography, that actually requires three programs to execute with satisfactory results.

The first program called upon is Photomatrix that merges the three digital images into a "tiff" file that can be opened with Photoshop and a noise reduction program. I use Neatimage to reduce the noise in the HDR tiff file.


The last step is to do post processing in the noise reduced merged HRD file. It is here that I correct for lens distortion, white balance, sharpening and other filters and adjustments that are readily applied in Photoshop.

You have to agree -- it is a terrific view, one that is not available in Texas.

And that is why we remain here for the duration.