Yes and no. All of those particular pictures were taken in 2004 and 2005, using a 3.5 megapixel pocket camera which did not have HDR capability built in. My current camera (nothing special, just a Nikon D3100 entry level DSLR) doesn't either. Those older images were shot to JPG, because that was what the camera's default setting was, but now I usually shoot to RAW. So, what I do is open the original image in Camera Raw, and output bracketed exposures based on the original—usually 3, but sometimes 5 brackets depending on the exposure and color saturation for the original. So that artificially creates the brackets that would normally be created by the camera software. Then I post-process the bracketed images through Photomatix Pro to create the single tone-mapped image. After that, I import the tonemapped image plus the bracketed images into PhotoShop as a layered file. I make a copy of the tonemapped layer and designate that as my working layer. Then I start using Topaz filters to copies of either the original brackets or duplicates of the tonemapped layer. Then I start painting from the various filtered layers onto the working layer until I've got the image that I want. Unless I plan to do something more with it, I almost never save the result as a layered PhotoShop file. Instead, I flatten it and output a high res JPG.74novaman wrote:Beautiful shots, TAM.
Are some of those HDR type layered shots?
Sometimes I cheat. For instance, the grass in the foreground of THIS PICTURE appears also in the foreground of THIS PICTURE. The second picture was taken in December, and the grass was all dead, had been painted white for effect, and had wires and cables running all over it. So I imported a copy of the first picture as a layer in the second picture, and painted the nicer grass into the image and saved it that way. You can see some signs of cloning in the second picture if you look hard enough.
So the short answer is: I'm not shooting HDR, but I'm doing everything else as if it were HDR.
Very impressive work.
