So I was thinking today . . . (I know, I should stop that, right? ) I’ve been getting into HDR (high dynamic range) images lately just for fun. Those are the type of images/graphics they’ve started to use in video games to simulate the way your eye sees really bright lights and dark shadows.

In a normal photo of a sunset you might capture a nice (or just “ok” as in this case) image of the sky, but everything in the foreground is silhouettes, right? But you remember the scene looking so much better when you were there . . . the bark on the trees, the snow on the limbs, the saturated colors in the sky . . . so what happened when you took the pic?

Well, the camera picked an “average” value to determine its exposure level, so it underexposed the shadows and overexposed the sky. Sure, you can manually decrease the exposure to see the sky better, or increase the exposure to see the trees better . . . but you can still only have one or the other.

Your eye looks at things differently. It adjusts its “exposure” locally instead of across the entire scene. So it exaggerates the range of contrast within the dark areas and within the light areas, but dampens the differences between the dark and light areas.

HDR imaging takes a set of camera photos at a wide range of different exposures, and combines them using an algorithm that behaves similarly to your eye. So the result is that the picture looks similar to the way your eye might have originally seen things. Like this photo.

Alright, so what does this all have to do with my blog? Well . . . I think I’m going to play with making some HDR porn soon! I mean really, look at most porn photos, and the lighting is completely flat. And the few photos you see with interesting lighting, you can never see the . . . “important” parts . Especially when there’s more than one person in the scene! So . . . wish me luck, and you might soon be witness to the very first HDR porn (that was the evil genius smile!)