Pretty Pictures Of Pointless Things

Briareos H on 14/6/2009 at 18:22

All pictures except the first (which is from my hometown in the south of France) are from (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Réunion) Reunion Island, a french hiker's paradise. It's located between Madagascar and Mauritius, east of Mozambique.
Spent a month there, this is a fantastic destination with a ton of things to do and to see. Best known for its active (http://anodal.org/galerie/plog-content/images/__le_de_la_r__union/__le_de_la_r__union/dsc04067.JPG) volcano, the "Piton de la Fournaise".

june gloom on 19/6/2009 at 00:31

Hello. This afternoon I went nuts with a camera and took some pictures.

(http://i160.photobucket.com/albums/t185/dethtoll/sunsetparkinglot.jpg) This is the best one by far. It was also my one indulgence for my obsession with parking lots at sunset.

... I kinda passed it off on some consoletard friends as a screenshot from Call of Prypiat. Does that make me a bad person?

TBE on 19/6/2009 at 01:13

I was thinking it looked like a Shadows of Chernobyl screenshot. I thought this before I panned down to your comment, which only reinforces it. :) I like the clouds.

Renzatic on 16/9/2009 at 23:52

It was a dark and stormy day. Usually don't take pictures during days like this since everything turns out too dark. But hell, I thought, I've just read something about HDRI photography. Today could be about perfect for giving it all a go.

Now the one thing I hate about HDRI photos is that they look way too toneless and blasted. It's supposed to mimic the way we see things, but instead looks like someone went way overboard with the Photoshop filters to the point of hey I'm a dumb shit. I tried to keep that in mind when I went out.

So I hit up the old abandoned house, since it's about the neatest thing within 5 minutes of where I live, and took a couple dozen photos of the same shot. Been mixing, matching, and tweaking ever since, and came up with (http://users.chartertn.net/greymatt/HDR_exp.jpg) this shot.

Turned out pretty damn decent in my opinion. The shadows in the grass got washed out a bit, but the rest is nice. One of the reasons why I like taking pictures in black and white is because I think it naturalizes the light a little better than color. With this little setup, I might be taking more color photos now.

Once it gets dark out and quits raining, I'm gonna try and get a few night shots and see if they fare just as well.

june gloom on 17/9/2009 at 00:10

wallpaper'd

BrokenArts on 17/9/2009 at 00:18

That is a VERY COOL picture! It also screams horror movie. Nice.

Aja on 17/9/2009 at 00:19

I think that's the most tasteful application of HDRI I've ever seen.

Renzatic on 17/9/2009 at 01:13

Hey, thanks everyone. Keep the compliments coming, I'm a sucker for em. ;)

I gotta say that this whole HDRI thing has done some wonderful stuff for my night shots. Beforehand, everytime I'd try to get a dark shot alongside a bright light, I always end up with the focal point shaded in some garish orange monochrome, and the light source washed out to all hell and back. It never looks the way I see it and want to shoot it, something that's always disappointed me...til now anyway.

Here's a shot I just took. Nothing too grand or spooky in this one, it's just the (http://users.chartertn.net/greymatt/HDR_breezeway.jpg) breezeway on the side of the house. The subject might be boring, but the lighting is about damn spectacular. Even with a ton of tweaking, I've never been able to get a night shot to come out that good before.

I think I'm gonna try and get one more picture before I call it a night. There's an old church way out in the valley I've shot a few times before. Got a couple of it pictures up on my Flickr page already, but I wanna see how it turns out when I try multiple exposures.

Shakey-Lo on 17/9/2009 at 14:41

Quote Posted by Aja

I think that's the most tasteful application of HDRI I've ever seen.

Agreed. Also agree with Renzatic that most so-called HDR looks like clown vomit made by a 14 year old with a warezd pack of 1500 photoshop plugins.

I did try some HDR stuff (taking 3 exposures) but couldn't get a satisfactory result in Photoshop, would you mind shedding some light on your technique Renzatic?

Renzatic on 17/9/2009 at 16:05

I think the biggest problem most people have when making HDRI photos is that they try to go for a totally even light spread. You rarely ever see one where the shadows look like shadows, or the highlights look like highlights. They're all super colorful, but they're usually blurry and don't look realistic at all.

The biggest problem is everyone uses a super exposed high for the highlights. You do that, and you end up with the usual garish HDRI images with the bloomed colors and lack of shadows. So, out of the 22 odd photos I took, I selected a fairly dark low exposure, a couple nice inbetweens, and a high that only just barely washed out the sky. After picking the shots, the real fun began because CS3 doesn't mix shots in it's HDR prog for shit. Instead, I used (http://www.hdrsoft.com/) Photomatix and mixed it in there. It's a helluva lot quicker, and you have more control over the final image with the tone mapping sliders. From there, I exported it back into Photoshop, goofed around with it using color balance, levels, hue and saturation, selective colors, brightness and contrast..all that good stuff, then finally did a high pass overlay on it to sharpen it up a bit. The end result is the shot above.

The HDR picture doesn't look vastly different than the individual shots I used to compose it, but I kinda intended that. I just wanted to even out the lights and darks a little bit and bring in some of the details you lose on the higher exposures. I think if you try and do that, instead of doing the usual HDR stuff, you'll end up with better pictures.

Also I didn't get my pictures last night because it started dumping down rain. I just hung out with a couple of people at Steak and Shake til about Midnight instead. I've got a big gettogether going on for Sunday though, so I'll have more then.

Edit: These are the 3 shots I used here...

(http://users.chartertn.net/greymatt/shot1.jpg) Low
(http://users.chartertn.net/greymatt/shot2.jpg) Mid
(http://users.chartertn.net/greymatt/shot3.jpg) High

(http://users.chartertn.net/greymatt/final.jpg) And the end result out of Photomatix. This is the shot I made before I cracked it, hence the watermarks (I'll buy it eventually, I swur). After this, the rest is all Photoshopery.