mud pies to medicine: Sunset

Friday, January 27, 2012

Sunset

Anyone with an iPhone 4 needs to know, your camera phone 1. Probably takes photos better than that 2 year old point and shoot you use and 2. probably takes better landscapes than your average dSLR (read uber fancy big camera) user. I say it all the time and people don't really believe it. I've seen it with my own eyes though. Landscape often has difficult lighting. Top catch a subject against a pretty sunset, you either have to silhouette your subject or blow out your background. For example:

Silhouette shots are cool, but not if you want to see your subject

Now we can see the subject but not the sunset

Alternatively you can use your flash as a fill to expose the subject and the sunset. Except sometimes it still looks like flash, which is bad. And the sunset doesn't even look great.

So then you pull out your iPhone, switch on the HDR and take an amazing photo that would put my fancy camera to shame. This is especially hard to deal with looking at an old album of photos you took back when you weren't too familiar with the camera and didn't even use RAW. There are a lot of tutorials out there on HDR which basically takes three different exposures of the scene and stacks them so everyone looks just the right brightness. You can achieve the same thing with a fancy shmancy camera with a little learning, which I have yet to do. But with the basic concept in mind I created the photo below. I actually made a duplicate, editing each photo separately. In one I made the boat look right and as a consequence the sky turned to basically nothing. In the other I darkened the sky to bring out the real colors from the scene and as a consequence the boat turned almost completely black. Than I took these two images and stacked them on top of each other with the good sky on top and used an eraser to take away the bottom half of the photo revealing a nice boat. The result is a composite of two different edits on one photo that looks much better than the original.

#26 Catamaran Composite

2 comments:

TaraJanuary 27, 2012 at 3:15 PM
Fyi I totally read these as if you are talking to me and my point-and-shoot.

So, sorry to be supremely dumb, but...what's HDR? My iPhone4 and I wanna know. :)
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The inspiration you ask?

I miss making mud pies. There is this huge rock in my front yard. To call it a rock really does it a dishonor. It is a boulder, brought home by my father on a huge dump truck after he blasted it out of a work site. My mom one day told me that even though it is nearly 2.5 feet high, 6 feet long, and 2.5 feet wide, that it was, in fact, only half-showing. The scientist inside of me was disbelieving and set out to get some proof. Clad in a dress, bow in my hair, and my best accessory, a shovel, I trudged outside ready to prove my mother wrong. That is when the digging began. I dug, and dug, and dug, and nearly all 3.5 feet of Danielle fit in that hole when I had reached the bottom of the rock. That became my digging spot, my mud pie kitchen. Each day it was dug, and each evening it was filled back in. Sometimes the holes were small, sometimes they were enormous, and most days the hole was turned into my mud mixing bowl with that rock as my counter. The novelty never wore off. The ebb and flow of my childhood was, in many ways, measured by the ever-changing depth of that hole in the front yard, the hole that never really disappeared even each day after it was filled in. Even though the grass has grown back in that spot, there still remains, an indentation, the scars of a childhood well lived and the disbelieving scientists I have always been.

So, you ask me why I want to be a doctor? I do not want to be a doctor. I want to open a mud pie bakery with the cash register on that rock in my front yard. But, somehow, I doubt I would stay in business long, for the world seems to have lost its taste for mud pies. I guess being a doctor will have to do.