Transforming an Ugly Duckling

As Shot

I haven’t written much about HDR yet. I honestly have preferred to leave the HDR to the Lab and encourage everyone to be taking better pictures.

I’ve also emphasized shooting in RAW mode always. Since I started shooting RAW over 2 years ago, everything I shoot with the DSLR’s is RAW.

I also have deleted very few images since. Yes, there are a lot of them that are too dark, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to delete them. Instead I put them in cryogenic sleep till there is technology in the future that might take these images and turn them into masterpieces.

To the right you can see an example of transforming an ugly duckling.

Masterpieces ?

After HDR Processing

LOL, yes I exaggerate. But not as much as you might think. I’ve been going back over the thousands of images I have stored and have begun processing many of them using HDR.

As my technique improves and I find new ways of rendering images I sometimes go back and reprocess images I thought even HDR couldn’t salvage only to find with new settings they not only were salvaged but turned out to be remarkable.

HDRogenics

Yes, I do believe that is a new term.  I did make that up.  But even so there are some images you shouldn’t save.  Even though I have thousands of images in storage I delete the ones that are out of focus or blurred because I moved the camera.  Unless you have some artistic reason for keeping a hopelessly blurred image, delete them.  I often do in the camera before I ever download them to the computer.  Sometimes I can’t tell on the camera screen.  But when I view them, and they are blurred, I delete them.  I recommend you do the same.

But if it isn’t out of focus or blurry, (that’s in focus but moved, there’s a difference?) you might want to put those images in cryogenic storage for a shot at them in the future.

Tags: HDR Processing, Shooting RAW