Lost in transit
It's interesting how you get climatised to dubai demographic if you
don't take a direct flight.
With the western-eastern split of the people around you reflective of
your proximity to the destination.
I'm close ... I can smell it ... Probably not a good thing, or is it ?
T minus 65 min
Power up
If someone knows where I can find a few close to each other near London, do let me know ...
Done for the day
Driving with a hockey stick
On the plus side, I have been told that I have an uncanny ability to make the ball bounce behind the scope-thing before sending it on it's way at a direction that can only be described as something spit out by a random generator, including some outliers making their way behind me.
What can I say ... I'm gifted that way ... especially when it comes to sports. Time to tee up ...
Photo Tutorial - HDR 101
'Do not take picture of a subject with a bright light source behind them' ... all of us with a camera have learned this the hard way. Worry not, HDR is here to save the day.
High Dynamic Range (HDR) is based on increasing the range of information captured in the shadows and highlights. Lets analyse what the hell that really means.
Shadows;
Lets think this through ... You want to capture the detail in the shadows, the dark part of the image. Logic dictates you should over expose the image (refer to basics tutorial; part 1 & part 2). This will completely blow out the background, making the bright parts of the pictures completely white, but revealing the details in the darker areas of the image.
Highlights;
The same argument can be applied to the highlights. Here, we want to capture details in the highlights. To do that you need to under expose the image, to get some of the details in the hot spots. As you can imagine this will flatten the shadows, killing any and all details.
Putting Humpty Dumpty together;
HDR is the merged image, combining the extreme images into one that has the added details in the shadows and the highlights. Usually this involves three images, a normal exposure for your mid-tones (think of this as your average), an over-exposed image and an under-exposed image. When combined they are .... HDR, not be confused with Captain Planet, which requires 4 elements and "heart" to materialize, Ma-ti was soo the token south American guy in the show ... truly a 5th wheel.
However, once you have merged the three images you need to decided how bright you want the shadows to be etc. This is referred to as 'tonal mapping' and usually achieved through levels adjustment (i'll explain levels based on demand, in a later post) to get an image that looks surreal in the sense and dare I say magical !!
Practical application:
Enough theory, now for how its done
- On your camera you will find a setting called ABE which stands for auto bracketing. This allows you to set the over/under exposure brackets or ranges. This avoids a need to manually adjust the exposure between shoots. On my camera if I use a timer to take the shot, with ABE on, it takes the three shots automatically.
- Next you bring the three pictures (shadows, midtones and highlights) into photoshop which will happily combine the three exposure, giving you the HDR.
- Finally, you need to adjust the tones to tease rade out the shadows and highlights to your liking and you are done.
In summary;
This gives a very surreal looking picture which can look very unsettling. The trick with this is to keep it subtle so people can tell there is something interesting about the picture but not be able to put their finger on it. Secondly, since you will be taking 3 of the same shots, it's highly recommended that you employ a tripod unless you have utmost trust in you stability.
With that ... Go forth and HDR ...
Photo - today's lesson
Maths of beauty
“Symmetry defines beauty” .... this should not be news to most of us. Symmetry is all around us both natural and self induced ranging from the wings of a butterfly to that perfectly hung painting because the minute it’s crooked the symmetry of the frame is thrown off (lets ignore the painting for now).
People happily hypothesize about the importance of symmetry but never its driver. What drives nature, and through transitivity us, to seek symmetry? Why is it that all things must have an axis around which the object must be foldable?
My theory ... laziness ... it’s a lot easier for our eyes to process a symmetrical object requiring less process aligning the separate images received by each eye. So the easier it is to process an image the more aesthetically pleasing it is to the eye. That easy of processing is labelled as beauty.
There may also be balancing advantages to symmetry in nature.
As far as our faces go, we “distort” our symmetry through hairdos and accessories so an argument that symmetry is the be-all for all beauty is flawed. With the introduced warping of our appearances we have developed a secondary benchmark for the signs of “beauty” ... wait for it ... the “Jaw line”.
Having taken enough pictures I can definitively say that the most prominent feature of the face is its outline, defined by the jaw which frames the face. If the face is not 100% symmetrical you can always tilt it but a good jaw-line says that you are reasonably proportioned. You can be as big as the marshmallow monster from ghost busters but if you have a defined jaw-line I can guarantee that you will look good in pictures.
So a quick and easy way to look good in pictures is to suck in that double chin at the sound of “cheese” !!!
Wafer thin
It's chow time ...
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