My wife Keri is a talented photographer. She also has lots of fun photography toys. She recently upgraded to the Canon 40D, a really nice digital SLR that does just about everything. It has a LCD panel on the back that’s larger than the television in our bedroom. It’s got a button labeled “align satellite” and other one labeled “cure cancer”. It also takes really nice pictures.
This left Keri’s old camera, a Canon 10D, up for grabs. I suggested she sell it to offset the cost of her new camera, but it would seem that digital SLRs (older than say, ten minutes) hold resale value about as well as homes that have been featured in Monster House. She was considering having it modded to do infrared, but in the end decided to give it to me, probably so I wouldn’t break her camera. While she has outgrown the 10D, it’s an amazing camera for someone who doesn’t know their proverbial ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to photography. I used it to snap a picture of a container of milk for an earlier blog post and noticed that I accidentally took a really nice photograph.
Keri’s new camera uses all the same lenses as her old one, so we can share lenses, which is pretty cool. My hobbyist foray into photography doesn’t really warrant even a camera as nice as the 10D, much less the vast arsenal of shiny and expensive cylinder thingies she lets me use.
While I’ve always had some form of digital camera and have some primal sense of aesthetics, I’m far from a photographer. I’ve always found photography interesting, but not enough to really learn the nuts and bolts of it. Lately, though, I’ve been really intrigued by HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography, wherein one takes several shots of the same subject (typically employing a tripod) and tone maps them using software. Because you’re working with several exposures, there’s a lot more light information to work with than just one image. Everything in the image can be correctly exposed, no matter what the lighting conditions. The results can be stunning, and I was really interested in trying it out.
Keri set me up with the proper tools and software, in addition to some basic instruction. Despite the bitter cold we’ve been having these past few days here in Portland, I’ve been taking the camera with me on my walk in the morning, which just so happens to be during the “golden hour“. Yesterday I went out again at around 4pm and took the photographs that were used to make the image above. It’s far from perfect (the focus is kind of soft on the buildings and it’s a bit noisy) but I’m pretty happy to be getting results after only a few days of working in this medium.
The image in this post was taken at the Peninsula Park rose garden in North Portland, a few blocks from my house. I used the 10D and Keri’s EF 17-40mm f/4.0 L USM Lens with a circular polarizer to bring the clouds out. I set the ISO to 100 and took bracketed exposures +/- two stops from f/4.0. I brought the three images into Photomatix to do the HDR business, then did some final tweaking in Photoshop using the PhotoTools plug-in. I think it came out pretty okay for an early effort.
