Sky background

Was taking a break just lying down on the concrete after taking pictures of things in the backyard. Jr. and the little one came up to me and said "get up. Let's ride the cycle"

In an attempt to make her go away from me for a second, took the camera that was already in my hand and flashed a picture..

The kids actually made a game of it.. they would lean over me and request a picture be taken.

and my ace model posed for a photo after forcing me to sit up...(reference portrait here)

Works out rather well with the sky as a natural background, no?

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More photos from around the house

Playing with the software, realized that there is an alignment feature to align each picture to a reference to capture the light variation without increasing the blur.

In spite of using a tripod and taking the individual images in self timer mode, the few seconds it takes to change the exposure setting and clicking the shutter somehow moves the center of the image by a few pixels and that is enough to change the quality of the picture.

Found this trying to image a cabbage rose in our front yard.

Went back and zoomed in on a single rose in the flower vase and it came out crystal clear with fantastic detail even inside the shadows within the petals.

Original plan to go to take a picture of the golden gate didn't come through. Will have to try that another day..

For now, I am like a kid in a candy store.. so many possibilities with the same camera...

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A bouquet of roses - HDR Photography

Yesterday, our friends got us a bouquet of roses for the pooja. They are really beautiful roses and have a rich variety of colors.

The photo crazy idiot that I am, started taking pictures of the flowers. The colds were captured but somehow the depth of the roses were not coming out on the JPG's.

Then thought of using the HDR software and shot a series of pictures with the tripod and set it to a 2.4 second exposure with a range of aperture settings from

4.0,4.5, 6.0, 6.3, 7.1, 8.0, 9.0, 10.0, 11.0, 13.0, 18.0, 20.0

and then using the software superimposed select pictures to get a High Dynamic Range (HDR) image from this subset.

Sure enough, the image takes on more depth and gets the bright and dark ares of the roses to have the same amount of detail..

Here are two such composites.

One with almost all of the aligned images..

and one with a smaller subset..

Two realizations at the end of the photo editing process.

1. HDR is the closest I have seen a photograph capture what we see with our eyes.

2. Our eyes are way ahead! Way way way way ahead than any camera or software. God is the most brilliant camera maker! He provides us fantastic subjects like roses and fantastic images to our brain, courtesy of some amazing cameras, our eyes.

The fun continues tonight. Planning to go to my all time favorite, most photographed architectural subject in the bay area tonight..

No marks for guessing what that is!

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