LIFEISNOIZE

I usually leave the "often geeky" gear talk to my pat'ner Point Dexter, but this was just too good.  Plus I have a thing for homemade devices!

Check it out: 14$ Steadycam

Make sure to check out the useful add-ons!

Cheerio

By Phil

For some years now I've been looking at some HDR - High Dynamic Range - pictures and boy were they fantabulous! Not everybody like 'em well I do. I like the sometimes dreamy look of them HDR photographs.

Here is what the great Trey Radcliff has to say on the topic:

Photo By Trey Ratcliff 

Scott Bourne recently mentioned something to me that really struck a chord. He told me how surprised many people are when he mentions in classes that you can make HDR (High Dynamic Range) images in black and white. I told him I got the same reaction, and I thought it was just localized to me because my photos are normally so colorful. By sharing this little experience with me, now I can see this may be of universal interest, so I should write a little article about it! 

HDR is about light; it’s not about color. If you consider yourself a colorist, like me, then you do tend to gravitate to light with color. After all, that is the world in which we live. Monet, the Impressionist painter, whose tonemapped landscapes shocked the establishment, said, “Shadows are not black. No shadow is black.” For most ambient daylight situations, this is absolutely true. We can indeed have some dark shadows, but these are often at night, indoors, or with man-made lighting situations. B&W photography and HDR photography are thought to be worlds apart. Whenever I speak to groups, there is a consistent 20% or so that absolutely hate HDR, won’t like it, and never will. Then, there is about another 20% that leans on what is rapidly becoming an annoying old saw, “I like HDR, but only if it is subtly applied.”

It is curious to me that B&W photographers are often the first to criticize HDR as being “unrealistic”. If I were to retort that the world is indeed NOT black and grey and white, so their photography isintrinsically unrealistic, this is often met with scoffs because it is already a respected niche. However, once we get past all these ridiculous pedantic arguments (which I always feel like I win because Ihonestly don’t care as much as the other party in the argument,) we can start to discuss how light works. For artistic reasons, many B&W photographers can crank up the shadows and lights to make hard edges, wonderful shapes, and enshroud the photo with mystery. After all, that emo kid in the corner with the stupid hat looks so much more emo when the hard shadow falls across his pierced nose. Wonderful! Okay, so that form of B&W photography is alive and well, and it will always be an option for people who want to play around within well-established genres.

So, what’s going on with an HDR B&W anyway? Good question! Let me see if I can explain it. I will assume that your eye can indeed see more light levels than your camera can capture. Like Ron Burgandy said, “It’s science!” The goal is to get all the light levels your human eye can see into the final image. First, for those of you that have seen my new HDR book “A World in HDR” or read the online HDR Tutorial, you know that HDR photos are often (but not always) shot by taking three or more exposures at different shutter speeds. We are all familiar with “compositing” photos, in which we might take the blown-out area of one photo and replace it with the perfectly exposed area of another photo. This was a painstaking process before photoshop, but it’s still no cake-walk in there either. I wanted to say this because HDR is not this simplistic compositing in which you can take big “chunks” of a photo and replace them with other perfectly exposed chunks from other photos. The HDR process will take those multiple exposures and mix them all together on the pixel-by-pixel level. It would be the same as a human doing back-breaking compositing by looking at each individual pixel and choosing which of the three images the final one should come from. Crazy! We can let the software (which I recommend in the HDR Tutorial), do the same thing that the human brain does when interpreting light levels. I prefer to use the software to make a color version and then convert to B&W later in Photoshop. Then, you can mess with the greens and blues and all those crazy things you know you like to play with. You’ll see wonderful little light details and textures that maybe you have been missing for years.

I invite you to try this and compare it to a “regular” B&W photo. You can also make HDRs from a single RAW file (see above links), so perhaps you have some old ones sitting around. Try it with a handful of images and then look at them side by side. Maybe you will find something unexpected! Little Warning #1: Be careful of the HDR process on human skin. Just as in the situation with flat blue skies, the algorithm gets a little confused and can cause problems. In these cases, just mask in the original RAW where the skin resides. Little Warning #2: This is a fun and addictive thing. You may miss out on the birthday of a loved one or something, so it’s best to try this in measured doses.

Here is a few tips from Scott Bourne, a well renown photographer, on how to make your subject very comfortable before you take them portrait. Very useful indeed. You may follow Scott Bourne on Twitter @ScottBourne or on one of his many blogs at Photofocus.com

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By Andy Wariol

Photography by Le Michelle Nguyen and Philippe Alexandre Hamel.

Went to Mont St-Hilaire last week with the peeps. Bizarre... 6 Black urbanites - myself at the front - really looked ahead for that lil' adventure in the hoodz... I mean in the woods. Do I have to mention everybody was looking at us like we wuz ALIENS. Hey Kebs, aliens are green, from Mars, want you to take 'em to their leader and wanna conquer Earth. We had nothing like that. Sure we were laughing, sure we were fooling around, sure some of us went there with their designer jeans (I still don't understand that one) and Nike kicks... But nothing you Kebs never seen before. For God sake I saw someone there wearing Kodiak construction boots and a mullet! Now that is alien yall!! 

Anyway, we went there had a blast trying to sing some Kamp Krusty songs - We knew nothing of the Baden Powell, scouts badge wearing, starting a fire with dried lichen repertoire... So we started to discuss the idea of opening a little bar right at the paths crossroads. Being a pure product of my environment I said we could serve vodka-guru drinks just to boost aka CRANK them sweaty hikers. Then we talked about all them potions we drink when we go out and let me tell you, some of us were/are true dedicated alcoholics in a good sense of the word, if there is any?) - Ok, let just say they know their liquor and they are quite fond of 'em...

Must I say we had a blast up there. It was not crowded, was not to hot, dimmed sunlight. In one word PERFECT! I had a camera with me. I had my smallest point and shoot. I will never carry my SLR while hiking again. The last time I did that my experience was... unpleasant. So here are some pics I took. You could also watch'em on my Flickr joint. 

So enjoy!

Warioda, le nègre plus ultra...                                                 

Update on Friday, June 26, 2009 at 11:13PM by Lifeisnoize Editors

It seems I don't know how to count & I am visually impaired. We were 8 at Mont St-Hilaire and Mimiletta is not Black... I just had the flu (yeah in summer) so gimme a break... Still weak in the Force.