Tried to catch some nice evening sun down by the water the other day. Got some nice colors in this HDR image of the grasses even if none of the orange light came through. Really happy with the LR/Enfuse HDR plug-in though. The price is reasonable (donationware) and it can batch-process multiple images stacks. Not a lot of options to tweak but seems to work just fine.
Monument of a minuteman in Lexington Massachusetts, a pivotal place in America’s fight for Independence. The Lexington Battle Green is visible immediately behind. This is an HDR from bracketed exposures with the DSLR using a new plug-in I got for Lightroom. I had been using a trial another great HDR tool, but you will notice the watermarks are no longer present. The new tool has fewer features than the other, but the price fits my budget and the results fit my needs so I think we have a winner. Bought a nice HDR app for my iPhone too, more on that later…
I ran out one busy day to bring lunch to my wife, and across the street from her favorite deli is this little gray barn. I had been playing with the HDR photos lately so I composed my shot and took three different exposures with my iPhone and off I went. Turns out those were the only the three photos I took this day, if you even want to consider them three pictures and not just variations of the same one. Anyway, it turns out I have already used this composition in my p365, back in the spring on day 110. Same barn, same angle, but really very different photos.
I really should know the city better. I know that the glass tower is the John Hancock building, and I also know the stone church has some historic significance but the name escapes me. The building in the reflection I cannot name at all, but there’s a chance I just left from a meeting inside of it. This is an HDR composite from iPhone images. I love the way the tones are all even and nicely exposed in these composites…. I really need to break down and pay for this wonderful software. Maybe if I write some posts specifically on the Photomatix Pro software they’ll give me a comp copy.
The site of the old Waltham Watch Company. I was in Waltham for lunch and a meeting and decided to take a quick photowalk through the enter of town. In case the watermark didn’t give it away, this is another HDR composite image.
When I take the train into Boston I typically land in Boston’s North Station. On this day I was down by Boston’s South Station and was impressed with the old architecture of this grand building. Standing in the crosswalk I took a bracketed exposure of the face of the building and later combined them with an HDR package. I had been challenged in the past to make a good HDR image shots from the DSLR, but I feel now that I’ve got the whole process down pretty well. Now I just need to save up some pennies to get that pesky watermark removed. Anyone care to buy some prints to fund future projects?
I was fortunate enough to catch both ends of a rainbow that appeared over Boston during a recent visit. I didn’t have my DSLR with me that night but I think I did a good job capturing things with the camera from my pocket. To make these images I first took several exposures of each scene by focusing on different brightness levels within the frame. Back at the computer I used an HDR (High Dynamic Range) plug-in to merge the best parts of the exposures into a single image. The results are good and look pretty natural, the way that our human eyes see things as opposed to a single camera exposure.
Standing on the edge of the Charles River in Cambridge I spotted a rainbow landing on the John Hancock tower in Boston. This is an HDR composite from three exposures taken with my iPhone. The differences between this and the “properly” exposed original are subtle, but I liked the additional contrast in the sky and the water that the HDR brought out.
While not as clearly defined as the other end of the rainbow, this end landed on top of one of the Massachusetts General Hospital buildings. That’s the Longfellow Bridge on the right crossing the Charles River of course. This too is an HDR composite made from pictures taken with the iPhone.
On a side note, our son was treated for a serious illness at MGH, and we spend a good number of days “living” in that shiny building. Our boy is healthy again and back to a normal childhood, so we did find our pot of gold at the end of this rainbow.
-Josh
Recently I attended a technology user group in Cambridge Massachusetts. As I looked out the window I noticed the evening sun was just hitting the buildings in Boston on the other side of the Charles River. I took out my best camera (the one I had with me, of course) and fired off a number of shots using different points in the scene to focus on. Later I used the trusty HDR software to combine three shots from the iPhone to create the image we have here. Considering that I took this with a camera phone through the windows of an office building, I’d say the results aren’t half bad.
Another attempt at an iPhone HDR shot. Captured these on the run just after a partner meeting in northern Massachusetts. I think it came out OK, but certainly nothing fantastic from an artistic or technical standpoint. Always love being by the water though!
The family and I have been enjoying riding our bikes this summer. Recently I took the youngest boy out for a ride on the Minuteman Bike Path. We parked at the west end of the trail in Bedford and rode out to Arlington and back. Somewhere along the way I stopped and took some pictures of this green field and big fluffy clouds. This image is an HDR process from three iPhone images. Much happier with the results from this software package than from the last time I attempted an HDR image. I’ll have to try another HDR with some proper bracketed exposures from the DSLR.
