Excellent work. Probably because I don't know what I'm doing, but I've never had too much success with Photomatix. I prefer Dynamic Photo HDR. I made this Echo Lake HDR (a little exaggerated, I know) with it:
Thats awesome Tim! Really captures that early morning blue sky that you can only find in Florida (or maybe we just dont have it here in Illinois)
Looks good Tim, I really like the Echo Lake area. Was that handheld? Do the Canons take the bracketed shots on one press of the shutter, or do you have to take three shots in succession? Welcome back by the way. How was the Phillies' game?
You can set your camera to autobracket and the sequence. Then you put it in Continuous mode. Press and hold down the shutter button (or remote trigger) and it fires off the series. Maybe newer cameras do it differently but that's how mine works. I'm betting he used a tripod.
Maybe Tim can answer that - I'm thinking that they still use the shutter to cut off the sensor, but I thought that at one point they figured out how they could use a digital shutter especially when using live view. Okay, only when using live view.
Now that at least looks like a good sell on using HDR. I am in the very very very small minority group (actually, I'm in a lot of those small groups, like the 'Folks who don't like Star Wars' group, and the 'no rides that go in circles' group) who can't get into HDR. It seems it's like today's equivalent to the hula hoop - everyone's doing it - but I just don't find myself drawn to the HDR look at all. Every once in a while, one comes along that doesn't try to look quite so vibrantly fake and eerily luminescent...like yours above. In this case, the HDR blend was kept reaonably low and works more as a realistic highlight and shadow control tool. I'd actually consider using HDR for this type of processing every once in a while!
I'm in Justin's camp, too. I like them when it's used to fill in the detail where a camera dynamic range couldn't reach. OR...I like them when they turn a photo into something else. I saw one that looked like a water color painting that worked really well. It's those inbetween ones where the colors look fake that don't do it for me. I'll be testing HDR software soon as I will be writing about auto bracketing and thought an article on HDR would be a nice follow up. I've heard people say it's the first really different thing you can do in digital that you couldn't do with film. At least, not this easily.
I've been experimenting with Photomatix as an easier way to salvage pictures that may have been slightly underexposed or overexposed. I don't go crazy with the effects
Wiki says: ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_imaging Basically it's a photograph that has more than a usual amount of tone ranges, so you can see shadow details along with details in the brightly lit areas. ; However, this seems to mess with how objects look, especially Cindy's castle
