Posts Tagged Cityscape
HDR Photography
HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography refers to increasing the color range of a photo.
Our eyes are an amazing contraption. They quickly adapt to many lighting conditions, and the brain kicks in whenever help is needed. In certain conditions, your camera will fail dramatically (or just fail, depends how you look at it), be it a camera mounted on a spy pen or a new Canon 5D Mark II. The conditions I’m referring to are ones which include very bright and very dark areas. Correct exposure to the dark areas will burn the bright areas, correct expose to the bright areas will result in very grim dark areas.
Consider the following photos of average exposure, correct exposure to bright areas and correct exposure to dark areas:
 People's Park, Shanghai - EV 0 |
 People's Park, Shanghai - EV -2 |
 People's Park, Shanghai - EV +2 |
So what do we do? We take multiple shots with EV compensation! The photos above were taken at aperture priority with an aperture of f/16. The first image shutter speed determined by the camera for correct exposure: 1/640 seconds (high ISO used). For the underexposed image, the shutter speed went up to 1/2500 seconds (-2 means 2 stops under, so multiplied by 4). The overexposed image’s shutter speed was 1/160 seconds. Notice how the first photo is nice, but it loses details which are found in the other 2 photos (at a cost of ruining the remaining details of the image).
Next, we combine the photos into a single picture, by taking the correctly exposed areas from each photo. You can do it in Photoshop (many tutorials online) or use a program doing that thing exactly. I achieved the following result using the trial version of Photomatix (so forgive the watermark):
People's Park, Shanghai - HDR
Detailed building from the underexposed photo, details in the tree and water from the overexposed photo.
Check your camera user manual, usually it will offer you an auto-bracketing feature, which will take a normal photo when you first release the shutter, an underexposed on the second release and an overexposed on the third. You can also determine by how much do you want the EV compensation to be. By the way, using a tripod is recommended.
China
So I spent 2 weeks in Beijing, Shanghai, Macao and Hong-Kong.
I spent another week trying to sort out the 1500 pictures and select the ones I want to post here. I came up with 10 I felt like sharing here. Here they are:
Part of my legs hanging over part of the great wall. It was freezing cold (I’m not that accustomed to snow anymore) but the clear sky offered good visibility. I visited the wall a day before they closed it down for Obama, so I didn’t miss out on one of the world’s great wonders. Following is a picture of a woman selling whatever in the Summer Palace:
From Beijing I continued to Shanghai where I met up with a friend. Slightly warmer there, but the visibility was terrible. Foggy sky throughout my stay there. Above is the best I managed to produce of the river side view that no Shanghai picture collection would be complete without. Below, a photo of a man practicing his symbols on the park’s path using water, slowly fading away:
Here we have a photo of a small alley (above) and a kid (below, even though I’m stating the obvious here), just before he offered me the gummy snake he is holding:
For the next 3 photos, I remembered to try and play a bit with some long exposure. Since I didn’t quite carry a tripod with me, I tried to place the camera each time on a table, garbage bin or anything somewhat stable and hold it steady while I take the 2 second photo. The results are actually not that bad. So here we have a Shanghai major street, the Venetian Hotel in Macao and Hong Kong’s river side view, just before the light show (which was very boring and hardly worth the wait actually) started:
I’ll conclude with another mandatory picture of Hong Kong from the Peak:
All in all, this has been an amazing vacation. This is my first visit to China. And I know I’ve only seen it’s (amazing) urban side, missing out on many things this place has to offer, but I’ve experienced a new culture – and quite liked it.
Lastly, I will use this opportunity to introduce Lucille 2 (not sure of the name yet…), my brand new Canon 50D. She was purchased on my final day in Hong Kong, so actually you still can’t see any photos taken with her. But I promise good things will be arriving soon…
36 Photos
Continuing with my photography course, we’ve set out to Florentine neighbourhood in southern Tel-Aviv last Friday. This outing was with Gilad Benari, and was titled “A different angle on photography”. Our goal was to find that thing in photos which will make us stand out, or to be precise: to be unique. The exercise had two very strict and intimidating limitations: use a fixed lens (50mm) and no more than 36 photos.
36 photos in 2 hours? You gotta be kidding me. I’ve just started getting used to 200 photos in less than an hour. And on top of that, no wide angle or tele? Crap… Uh… Okay, let’s see what we’ve got:
Not bad (if I my say so myself regarding a photo of mine 
). These limitations made me think so much before releasing the shutter. Composition. Making sure I’ve got the camera on the correct parameters. And also planning ahead, like in this next photo, where I just stood there, looking through the viewfinder, waiting for someone to walk by:
At the end of the two hours, I realised I took 17 photos. It looked like I took this to the other extreme… This allowed me to take 5 photos of this urban leopard:
I got used to taking many photos. In order to post some, I’d go over them, delete the bad ones, then the not so good ones, then the expendables, then the slightly less better than the others and so on. Leaving the chosen few (or to be more precise: the undeleted few). Now I could choose the pictures I wanted rather than the ones I don’t. I’ve really enjoyed this exercise and would highly recommend it too all of you who are used to just take as many photos as possible.
I also recommend Gilad’s project: A Different Look At Israel. A unique look it is…
Photo #4
Ortaköy Mosque and the First Bosphorus Bridge
A visit to Turkey, February 2005.