High dyanmic range (HDR) photographs often tend to have a certain “over the top” look. Much of the time it only detracts from what might otherwise be a great natural image. But sometimes that look can really help your image communicate…

Regular readers know that I enjoy both HDR and black and white photography. So when our hosts at our recent Hill Country Photo Safari, Sharron and Larry Jay of BCNA, rolled out their fully restored antique chuckwagon I couldn’t resist combining them. To enhance the overall effect rather than use sunlight we lit the wagon with flashlights. Everyone had a lot of fun and got some great shots, but capturing the raw images only started my fun. Read more »

The great weather in Death Valley last week brought out lots of tourists and made getting into dinner a tough proposition. So with an hour to spend before we'd be seated there wasn't enough time to go back and look at images, so my daughter Annie and I decided to have some fun with our flashlights and the old Twenty-mule team Borax wagon out in front of the Furnace Creek Ranch. If you've never done it before there is almost no limit to the fun you can have with a flashlight or two (or your flash units) and just about any subject you can light up... Read more »

  Welcome to DPS 7-07. We hope you had a great summer. We sure did, highlighted by our July trips to Alaska for Brown Bear photography. Next year's trips are already mostly full so if you'd like to join us please sign up soon. Closer to home we've also announced our two Texas bird photo safaris for April and we still have one opening on our African "trip of a lifetime" photo safari in November. In the meantime I had a great time speaking at a symposium on High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging at Stanford which has given me lots of new energy to re-capture many local scenes using new techniques.

Stanford's Center for Image Systems along with Dolby Labs is hosting the ultimate HDR (High Dynamic Range) conference in a couple weeks. I'll be there speaking on a panel on tonemapping and more importantly the speaker and attendee list is a real who's who in the industry with Dick Lyon from Google, Michael Cohen from Microsoft Research, Ricardo Motta--the brains behind Pixims HDR video hardware, Greg Ward--HDR book author, and dozens of others. Read more »