Being a geek rules

I want to do some HDR photography, which stands for High Dynamic Range but first I have to sort out my computer/Adobe woes (I have a MAC but my CS3 is for a PC so I have to sort out what to do about that.)

HDR fascinates me. It allows you to relate, in an image, the same thing your eye actually sees when you're standing there. You can do this with your camera by taking, say, three shots of the same image - a dark one, a medium one and a light one - then process them by taking the best pixels from each image and using them to produce one photo. Or if there are moving subjects in the scene, you can take one RAW image and use "a cube of light" to get all the tones.

There's a lot of controversy surrounding HDR photos. Some people hate them, believing them to look too unreal. I love them. They look surreal, when in fact they are more real than what your camera interprets.

Trey Ratcliff over at his blog STUCK IN CUSTOMS is one of the best when it comes to taking HDR shots.

"If you can release what you know of as a photo, something new can enter your world." He describes an HDR photo as an experience, a feeling, what it felt like to be there. Here is a lecture he gave on HDR. It's long, but worth watching.

(In Trey's lecture, he references a scientist named Beau Lotto. I found Lotto's TED lecture and it will blow your mind as it busts apart everything you thought you knew about colour and how we see.)



Here is Beau Lotto's Ted Lecture, on how and why we see as we do.

"The light that falls onto your eye (sensory information) is meaningless because it could mean literally anything. And what's true for sensory information is true for information generally. There's no inherent meaning in information. It's what we do with that information that matters. So how do we see? We see by learning to see." Beau Lotto

And just to completely crack your nuts, there's this short video about the Golden Ratio, or why math is important when composing your shots, whether or not you're aware of it. Watch in in HD if you have that option.


I'm happy today because these three videos tickle my brain cells.