Float On

This was shot at The Shangri-La Tanjung Aru Resort. I was walking around the beach area looking for things to photograph when I spotted this boat.

I set the camera to AV mode and turned on Auto Exposure Bracketing with -2,0,+2 settings. The three shots were merged with Photomatix and then later processed with Adobe Photoshop.

Heineken

I took this picture last year. I hadn't really put much thought into the composition because...well... I didn't know much about it at the time. It was one of the first few HDR pictures that I tried to take [with the Canon EOS 1000D].

I never did get around to edit it properly until now. Three exposures taken with AV mode set at -2 EV,0 EV,+2 EV respectively. I processed the HDR in photomatix, then applied tone-mapping through photoshop.

You'd think that was all I had to do...

It was hard work and layer by layer it continued to pile on. It took around an hour to finally get the photo to look like the way I had imagined it in my mind, and I just realised I had an assignment that I could have easily finished a few hours ago xD.

D-Lighting on the Nikon S210

I took these pictures around the city with the Nikon S210. I was playing around with the D-Lighting feature.

Active D-Lighting is the name for the software program which automatically adjusts shadows, highlights, colours and therefore contrasts. It’s very good at adjusting dark shadows without adjusting the highlights so the dark parts of your picture become lighter.

Newer Nikon cameras now have this software built in. This is also sort a way of increasing the dynamic range of a photograph. These photos were taken from the inside of the car so any reflections in the photos are caused by the car window.

Sutera Harbour [Evening Shots]

These are the photos from the shoot last Saturday evening at Sutera Harbour :)

FYI [The shoot is strictly just for fun and experience] There are more but then these are the best of the bunch. xD I felt pretty much on my game this time around :p It was actually super hazy that day the sky was quite overcast. It really never hit me what a good place Sutera Harbour is for a shoot.

As you can see we shot from evening till night.We shot at night using our pop-up flashes to light each other's portraits since we dont have shoe flashes. All we needed was a slow shutter and we synchronised our shots together just by counting to three. The last photo is probably my best done HDR and tone mapped picture at the moment.

Lots of thanks to Cheryl [my sister], Joanna, and Esther for volunteering to be models. Well done :)

Going HDR

In image processing,computer graphics and photography, high dynamic range imaging (HDRI or just HDR) is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of luminances between light and dark areas of a scene than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention of HDRI is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to shadows.


This method was developed to produce a high dynamic range image from a set of photographs taken with a range of exposures . With the rising popularity of digital cameras and easy-to-use desktop software, the term HDR is now popularly used to refer to this process. This composite technique is different from (and may be of lesser or greater quality than) the production of an image from a single exposure of a sensor that has a native high dynamic range. Tone mapping is also
used to display HDR images on devices with a low native dynamic range, such as a computer screen.

One problem with HDR has always been in viewing the images. Typical computer monitors (CRTs, LCDs), prints, and other methods of displaying images only have a limited dynamic range. Thus various methods of converting HDR images into a viewable format have been developed, generally called "tone mapping".

Early methods of tone mapping were simple. They simply showed a "window" of the entire dynamic range, clipping to set minimum and maximum values. However, more recent methods have attempted to compress the dynamic range into one reproducible by the intended display device. The more complex methods tap into research on how the human eye and visual cortex percieve a scene, trying to show the whole dynamic range while retaining realistic colour and contrast.

Images with too much "HDR" processing have their range over-compressed, creating a surreal low-dynamic-range rendering of a high-dynamic-range scene. All these images are taken with 6 different exposures and I used Photomatix, a software that generates HDR images using Tone Mapping.