HDR Portraits

A post that may be too technical from a Photography stand point.

Someday time permitting, will break this down in layman terms.. Until then, my apologies.

 * * *

It is no secret that I love HDR photography.

Now that there is Photoshop CS5 and the HDR plugin, don't have to worry about playing around with demo versions of Photomatix (which is awesome compared to CS5 with the controls and presets though) and can get photographs merged and tonemapped without a watermark!

Usually HDR photos are of landscapes and still subjects simply because the ghost effect is not easy to take advantage of in many compositions.

That is why you do not see many Portraits in HDR. The subject has to stay reasonably still for a long time. Time to take at least three shots (normal, over exposed and under exposed) and usually the over exposed shots taken without a flash, even with high ISO take upto a 1/4 seconds or more! 

Have tried HDR with the kids in the past where they were asked to hold their breath and it came out reasonably well. Tried that earlier today and it was not successful. Then decided to turn the camera around to some more co-operative subjects or catch them at moments when they are in relatively still mode.

Note the detail in the shadows and you will see why High Dynamic Range makes a difference in the photographs. All of the three images below were created using 3 individual images each (-2.0, 0, +2.0 eV exposure bracketing) , no flash, high ISO (800 to 1600) at f4.0 with times changed from 1/125, 1/25, 1/6 seconds to get differnet exposures. They were merged in CS5 using the HDR option and fine adjusted. 

Let me know if this changes your perception of HDR as being overly surrealistic..

So far personally happy with the results. That means, we now have a new Gallery for HDR photos on the site! 

Comments

Till today I never figured out that people were leaving comments in the new website. Was only getting comments on Google+ and Facebook cross posts and thought maybe "blogger" or blog sites were a dying thing.

Saw this comment from GV on old website, went to the new website and saw so many comments over the last few months and felt really bad!

My apologies to all of you who left comments in the new website. Will go over it tonight.

Have finally figured out how to get an email notification from the new site when someone leaves a comment.

Good news is that Blogging is not dead yet!

What a week!

After visiting doctors, labs and pharmacies for the front end of the week, the later part of the weekdays were just spent surviving the days. 

The routine was wheeze from 11PM to 5AM, go to bed at 5AM and be woken up by a work phone call or the kids, get some idea of time and space and go to work by 9, struggle through the day and come home. 

Survived till 2PM, 3PM and managed to work till 4:30 today. So that is improvment on the stamina side of things.

The breathing is still iffy at best and have found that sleeping in the sitting position till exhaustion takes over is the best strategy. 

Krishna Ummachi's birthday came and went without me doing anything of significance. Being able to partake a few of the dishes in sample quantities was my contribution to the function. As a rule of thumb it is very difficult to even be sick in this house with the parents and MIL present and having the kids in the house with no school.

You come home at 2:30 and want to go sleep and 

a. Parents come out all concerned and give you two suggestions every 5 minutes (usually the same suggestion with a time lag) on how to improve your situation. Most of these are not going to help in anyway as they will be things I have already tried or know won't make a difference.

b. MIL will either join with parents with the concern or try to push me the other way with some enthusiasm. "Let's go back to the hot room and you will be fine!" she will say and off I will go and barely survive the session. That is better than the first option to some extent. 

c. The kids who are not used to seeing daddy gasp for air will try to wake me up every 15 minutes in an attempt to cheer me up. Let's go biking daddy! Let's go to the park daddy! etc. etc. Their idea is that if I do physical activity the lungs will forget the problem. Little do they know that going outside itself is an ordeal now..

and of course how can we forget d.. or di or my own little Kolaveri di.. 

d. San will come home from work to check on me and declare "if you can pick up the phone and answer a work call or participate in a meeting even on mute, you can help the kids with the Kumon or go back to work. today is the last day I am losing sleep because you won't rest during the day and wheeze all night!" Well, she has her point and so does everyone else in the house.

The best thing I actually did was realize that there was no place where rest was possible.. not at work, not at home. So parked the van under a tree near the house and slept there one afternoon for a couple of hours. That was a great move! 

The weekend is here and for starters got my mind off of things and started browsing old pictures from the Canon Powershot S30 days with the kids. Found a few JPG's that were interesting and processed them on Photoshop and uploaded them to the Galleries. 

In case you only read the blog on reader... do checkout the Galleries tab at www.sundar72.com

Here are some samples...

Hanuma bay in Hawaii when we visited for two days en route to Australia in 2004!

Bryce canyon in Utah.. We were there the day the Tsunami hit and did not know as we were cut off from civilization!

Took this one with one hand while parasailing in Seattle right around Sunset!

There are more pictures. Going to start a new tab in the website called "The story behind the pictures" and explain the photograph in more detail. Maybe it will be of some use to other Photographers in training...

More tomrorow..

Until then, I will pray for better breathing, something we all take for granted all the time!