Been in southern California for about 2 months now, networking out and getting my movie project buzz started. While waiting for meetings, I’ve been wandering around the South Park area of San Diego, just snapping photos with my cell phone, and then I pulled out my Nikon and started taking “serious” pictures.
By serious pictures, I mean I’m hauling around my tripod and several lenses, walking miles a day for the right pictures.
Many people will hit the usual areas of a city, but I went out looking for unusual and unique to the area photo opportunities. First scouting with my cell phone camera, and then going back when the weather was “just right” with the better equipment.
Decided to shoot “HDR” type of images this time out. Then started up an Instagram account to share them around. My Instagram is Oldtex59, or clink this link.
Even an out of the box version of Photoshop or Lightroom can process HDR images quite well. For this blog post, I’m not creating a HDR tutorial. This is mostly showing off some recent photos.
My method is to use a tripod, fire off 5 or 7 or, hell, even 9 exposures using the Nikon’s bracketing mode. I set it for a EV shift per exposure, such as -2, -1, 0, +1 and +2… etc. I then look at the images in Lightroom, export a TIFF or PSD from the Nikon raw file, then stack these in Photoshop using the automagical Merge to HDR Pro (found under File, Automate). I’ll fiddle around with the various settings, looking at making a very naturalistic HDR or out-of-this world Vivid van Gogh image… with a touch of Tim Burton.
Check them out, in the new gallery collection, San Diego HDR. It’ll be updated while I’m in SD.
Cheers and have a happy New Year!