Then when I left the hotel to drive home, I started hearing rumors about getting 12″ of snow . . . and sure enough by the time I got home there was a level 3 snow emergency and blizzard warnings out. That pic up there is my front porch after I shoveled a walkway through the 3-feet deep drifts After being out of town for a week, I had literally no food in the house, so I had to go back out to the grocery store the next morning.

The only good thing that came of this week is this really cool pic I managed to get of my landscape lights completely buried and shining up through the snow. And yes, it’s an HDR photo too. I’m getting better at this HDR thing . . . maybe I still think this looked better in real life, but overall it’s still a neat photo (imho ).

Anyway, I will hopefully catch up on posts this week, I’ve got a small stockpile of things to write about!

No longer will you have to suffer from washed out backdrops! Silhouetted figures will be a thing of the past! And remember, you saw it here first on TGirl’s Blog.

Ok, I know it’s a totally cheesy and unimpressive use of high dynamic range, but considering the way the photo would have come out without HDR . . . I was pretty impressed with the results. Please ignore the fact that my cat (Oscar) is missing his head in the HDR image though . . . he didn’t exactly hold still for the series of images!

And yes, that *is* my new logo, so glad you asked Like it?

This is a regular pic from the set, I’m not showing the HDR ones!

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!)