I’m conducting an intensive hands on HDR Workshop “Using HDR Photography to Create Your Own Personal Style” March 22-23 at Outdoor Photo Gear’s new location: 13305 Magisterial Drive, Louisville, KY 40223.
Class size is limited so that I can give each workshop participant my close attention. Full details and registration are located at the above link.
Click on the image to open it at full size in another window.
Tuesday I was down in Moulton, Alabama to attend my maternal Aunt Helen Parker’s funeral. She had a long life of 94 years and though it was sad to know she had passed on it was also reaffirming in the way the passing of a loved one draws a family together. Aunt Helen had started her life as the daughter of sharecroppers in the Alabama cotton fields but through hard work she and her family rose into a comfortable middle class farm life. She, as so many others in the south, had worked hard and risen above the tough times that almost all rural southerners endured especially through the Great Depression. Throughout her long life her faith and love for her family strengthened and supported her through the loss of two husbands and many others in her large family. Aunt Helen ended her life surrounded by her nieces and nephews who all loved her dearly. Her life was one of persistence and compassion and we will all miss her and remember fondly her lilting “I love you” which she always said when she hugged us as we were heading out her door after a visit.
On my way to Moulton I passed through Decatur Alabama and saw these large buildings alongside the railroad tracks on the west side of the city. I had never been down that particular street before and in all the times I had travelled down there I had not seen these unusual structures. I am always drawn to abandoned industrial sites and decided that on my way back home I needed to stop and photograph them. When I asked my cousins what they were they told me they had once been part of a large cotton oil and cotton meal manufacturing complex.
When I arrived there I found a business office in another building nearby and asked if I could go in and photograph the place. The receptionist said that they belonged to the city of Decatur and that she didn’t know any more about them. I decided that I would find an opening in the fence around them and see for myself what mysteries they held. The sky was heavy with cold gray clouds and a light mist was falling as I unpacked my cameras and scouted for and found an opening in the fence around the property. The wind was pretty strong and the metal on the buildings rattled and creaked; it was as if the buildings were speaking to me telling about their earlier days as productive structures now left to decay and eventually return to the earth.
I shot everything that day in a three frame bracket set of -2, 0, and +2 EV. I then merged them in NIK HDR Efex Pro 2 before finishing them in Aperture 3. In some of the interior shots I went into OnOne Software’s Perfect Effects and played around with some of the many presets. The images below are from that experimentation and application within the Perfect Photo 6 Suite from OnOne after being merged and tone mapped in NIK HDR Efex Pro 2. I like the way that the two software programs complimented each other and allowed me to bring out the greens that the moisture inside these buildings had created by feeding mosses and molds on the corrugated steel. My final processing with all these images was in Aperture 3 where I used various adjustments and completed the sharpening prior to exporting the final images you see here.
Click on the image to open it at full size in another window.
Click on the image to open it at full size in another window.
Click on the image to open it at full size in another window.
Click on the image to open it in a new window.
Click on the images to open them in another window
These images are black and white conversions of HDR images that I created from a three shot bracket set using +2, 0 and -2 EV frames that I first merged in NIK HDR EFex Pro 2 to create a HDR image. After merging and tone mapping them I returned them to Aperture 3 where I applied the black and white adjustment with an orange filter. I also sharpened them and added a little mid-contrast to show the texture in the rust and intensify the shadows.
Click on any image to open it in a new window.
As a rule Louisville doesn’t get a lot of snow and this winter has been one where we have had maybe 5 or 6 snows. The weather here has changed a great deal from when I was a boy growing up here in the 1950s. Back then we would get really cold winters with snow from November thru April. We could go sledding for days on end and once the snows fell they stayed around for a long time. That has all changed in the past 10 or 15 years and now we seldom have a snow that stays around more than a few days.
Last Wednesday we had snow showers in the morning and by afternoon the temperature was back in the mid 40s. I was in town visiting at my friend Chuck Rubin’s used camera store when I looked outside to see a heavy wet snow falling. I jumped at a chance to photograph Waterfront Park in the snow and immediately headed down to the park. I decided to shoot from the Big Four Bridge, (I’m sure everyone who reads this blog is surprised to hear that LOL), since the snow was really coming down and was covering the ground quickly. Later that afternoon the temperature was back in the upper 40s and the snow was gone as quickly as it arrived
I shot everything in bracket sets of +2, 0 and -2 EV so that I could process them as HDR images. The light was fairly bright so I kept my ISO set at 200 which resulted in fairly fast shutter speeds. The snow was so dense that it rendered itself in gray tones and bright highlights much as clouds do when the sun is in and out. I used NIK HDR Efex Pro 2 to merge the frames and created a couple of my own presets starting with the Deep #2 preset as my basis. I was able then to move through the several merged sets in a little less time than trying to adjust each merged set individually. Even with that I still had to make adjustments to my preset depending on the balance of light and dark in the individual HDR images.
After completing my initial processing in NIK HDR Efex Pro 2; I opened each one in Aperture 3 where I completed the adjustments for exposure, contrast, detail, vibrance, and sharpening. I also did a small amount of spot removal where individual snowflakes rendered themselves as sensor spots sometimes do. I did not attempt to remove every snowflake’s shadow from the sky because part of what I wanted to convey was how large and dense they were.
Below you will find more from that day’s photo shoot. I hope you enjoy them and will comment where you think appropriate. I converted some of the images to black and white after merging them in NIK HDR Efex Pro 2 to create a different version that was more about contrast and form than color.
