The photo to the left was on from the hike in, it’s a giant sandstone monument that was erected in the mid 1800′s at the location of an accidental shooting death . . . ok kind of creepy, especially since it sits in the middle of a rather eerie bog. But the sun was at the perfect angle and I thought it was really pretty. Plus I was practicing my HDR photography again, and I like the way the photo came out

And just because I want you to feel bad for me ( ), here’s a pic from the top of Mount Algonquin, second highest peak in the Adirondack Mountains . . . during some really crappy weather. It rained ALL day on Sunday, and we were literally hiking through the center of a cloud at the top. Not to mention the 50mph winds. Exciting stuff! Ok, actually I had a great time, even though the weather was pretty miserable for mountain climbing. Plus now I’ll be in great shape to take more crossdressing photos for you

Oh well, I like the pic regardless, hopefully you do too And yes, that is a new toy in there, don’t let me forget to write a post about how it worked out (tomorrow with a little luck). Also have lots of new tgirl clothes to tell you about, I’ve been doing way too much shopping over the past week or two

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!)

Actually, I have three 1000W lights, but I don’t have a circuit in my house that can handle more than one of the lamps for more than about 5 min . . . so I started trying to use just one light plus my
camera flash, and that made a mess. Well, it wasn’t terrible, but it certainly wasn’t very impressive either. So I finally found some outlets on a different breaker that aren’t too far away, and I can at least get 2 of my lights on at the same time.

I’ve been keeping the lights at right angles to eachother for the most part, with a wide softbox sitting low and close and a tall softbox farther back and higher up. I think all these sets had the tall softbox at about double the intensity of the wide one, but since it’s also farther away the light falling on the scene from both is probably about the same. I should work on that a bit more to add some more depth to the scene, but I’ve been trying not to turn anything up too far so I don’t blow any more breakers.

I’ve also been having a lot of fun with my mirror lately. Not only does it make for some really interesting picture though, it also lets me watch myself while I’m posing. Sometimes I actually forget about the camera for a few minutes and just watch myself in the mirror! But anyway, I think it adds to the artistic feel of the photos. Though it also had a bit of a learning curve to keep both the camera AND the lights out of the mirror’s reflection!

I just (finally) learned how to airbrush in Photoshop as well. Not that I plan on using it much, but it’s still fun and can help clean up some less than perfect pics. I practiced a bit on the pics in this post, but you probably can’t really tell since I resized them pretty small.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to lately. Enjoy the pics, and of course if you want to see the rest of the sets, they will eventually be up on The Crossdresser .com