First things first, yesterday was my birthday - which also means it was the best day of the year.

With that covered here’s whats new:

I was going to start a photo project that captured the idea behind my online and photography alias “smallredprint”

I was going to create a series of B&W photos that displayed some sort of red color in all of them. It was sort of a new years resolution of mine to come up with a project and stick to it to help feed my ever lacking motivation. It seems like between work, school and general upkeep on the house and social life I find it hard to really want to spend whats left going out to scary places and finding new ways to take bold photographs.

One issue I have is that I love street photography, yet I am terribly shy ad hate feeling like I am invading someone space or privacy. It presents a problem when trying to photograph strangers. It even keeps me from asking people to pose for portraits for me. I now what kind of photographer am I ever to be??

So I started this project and I will admit I was slacking. So a few days ago to try and gather some motivation I was browsing Fickr.com. And on there I found a photographer who did a large amount of HDR photographs.

Now let me take a minute to explain HDR to some of you who might not be familiar with it (actually this was the first encounter i had had with this type of photography). HDR photgraphs are made by taking 3 or more photographs of the exact same image, which vary from underexposed, to right exposure, to over exposed. Then you use a program such as CS2 which has a build in HDR merger and it creates this HDR file for you. Now what is actually happening to the image is the computer is taking all the sources and placing them into one large image that is a 32 bit file compared to a jpg which is only 8 bit. So what does that mean if i haven’t already lost you? It means an image with a lot more color and brilliance. Now I could get into a lot more detail about the logistics of this process but for the purpose of this post I’ll save you from all that tech-y talk.

(if your interested in learning more here is a really great links on the subject - http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/high-dynamic-range.htm)

So I got interested in trying this type of photography out for myself. I learned really fast that it was very difficult to do without a very sturdy tri-pod. Since I haveyet to make a career of photography I am pretty limited in what I will allow my self to spend money on - especially not knowing if my photography will take me anywhere. But after the whole process I came up with one image that I must say I am proud to call my first HDR photograph.

All in all I decided to spend a little money - after all with my birthday just passing I had a little extra to spare and I bought myself a nice new sturdy tripod. I just couldn’t justify letting something as silly as not having a good tripod come between my new found motivation and my desire to have such.

Here are a couple images:

The one on top I did for the first project I started.

And this bottom one was my very first HDR. I’m pretty excited at the result.

So needless to say I have my new found inspiration. I hope to be updating soon and often.

- Sarah Jane

In: Art, Expression, Photography | tags: HDR, high dynamic range, image, photo, Photography, picture, railroad, technique. | #