I ‘m sitting in Los Angeles International Airport waiting for my Thai Airways flight to Bangkok. I’ve got the non-stop which should only take 17 hours. When I arrive Bangkok, I’ll grab a cheap hotel and rest before catching my Bangkok to Yangon flight on the morning of October 1st.
When I arrived at the airport in Los Angeles, there was a beautiful cloud formation over LAX’s historic “Theme Building” as it’s called. The iconic structure just underwent a three-year renovation. Its observation deck, which offers a 360-degree view of the entire airport and was closed after 9/11, and recently reopened to open to the public, in June of this year.
The theme of the structure, with its soaring arches, was “the unbridled optimism of the future” when it was built 50 years ago in the center of Los Angeles International Airport.
I must confess that these light having some very sophisticated digital SLR cameras, I’ve never done any high dynamic range imagery, it just doesn’t seem to fit in my type of work. but while I was walking from the domestic terminal to the international terminal and was approaching the theme building that you see above, I saw the perfect opportunity to shoot some HDR photography with my new PRO-HDR app for my iPhone.
The way that high dynamic range images are created with a digital SLR or with the PRO HDR iPhone application is essentially the same. Several images taken at different exposures are created and then combined via software, to create a composite image.
In the case of the iPhone application, PRO HDR the first point your camera at a very contrasty scene and tap on a portion of the image that is very bright, then take the picture….camera exposes for the bright areas.
next the software instructs you to tap on a portion of the image that is very dark, and then take the picture. This time the camera, exposesthe image to capture the dark areas.
after these two images are created, the Pro HDR application goes to work, combining the two images. The result is a picture in which one can see both the light and dark areas. This technique however is not without it’s own pitfalls. You will notice that there is a car in the dark photograph and a car in the light photograph, in the composite image both cars are visible, the light car is actually partially transparent!
Hi Karl,
I hope you are having a safe trip!
Amazing what a camera phone can do with software nowadays! But no software will ever be able to replace the artist’s eye, and the ability to convey emotions and impact to tell a story like your images always do!
Talk to you soon, and Cheers!
Terry
Have a great trip and a fantastic workshop!
Who would ever think of Karl trying the HDR thing? NICE! hahahahahha
Cheers my friend.
Celso
I ate in the restaurant that used to be up in that tower on my way to basic training in the Air Force in 1976, savoring my own “unbridled optimism for the future”, and drinking the last beer I would have for a while.