Australia was my first all-RAW photo trip, which will allow me to continue to produce High Digital Resolution photos from any of the pictures we took. I've cooked up several so far, some bracketed with three, five or even nine exposures, others from single snapshots, exposure-adjusted and saved as three or five 16-bit .tifs in Photoshop.
You'll find critics of HDR wherever you look (random Aussie skeptic) and I'll grant that a lot of early HDR work (mine too, for sure) has been pretty heavy-handed. But you have to embrace the technology and appreciate what it can do. (Part of the trick in the program I use, Photomatix, seems to be to turn "Strength" way down. And I prefer to keep "Saturation" pretty high in PhotoMatix and then pull that back in Photoshop afterwards.)
After a few early months of being dazzled by HDR over-effects, most people probably will tend to drop the drama, opt for a less-is-more posture and learn subtlety. Betcha the people who huff about HDR were late to give up film for digital. Bet they scoffed at CDs and then digital downloads longer than you did, too.
I've opened up a small, quiet Australia HDRs Gallery on EarthPhotos.com. No big deal. It's only ever going to have a handful of HDR photos that I think turned out well. If you click on the photo in the larger window there, I've set it to open up into a nice, big pretty display. (And be sure to give any photo that grabs you a thumbs up or thumbs down when you mouse over the image. That decides the Popular Gallery.)
You'll see a bunch of HDRs in the main Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com now. Many were created on the fly in Australia or during the 17 hours of quality time we spent on Delta Air Lines flying home. Almost all were cooked up on my tiny Macbook, which - nothing personal, Macintosh - is no monitor for painstaking work. So from now on, the best new stuff goes in the new HDR Gallery.
I aim to add maybe two or three a week until the material's exhausted, and then just leave it at that. Enjoy them.
(Photo of sunrise at Watson's Bay, Australia.)
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