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Victoria Square fountain by night, Adelaide



This is my first attempt at Dynamic Range Increase (DRI) - it's a layer mask composite of 5 exposures 1 stop apart from 0.6 - 10 sec, f/10 @ 17mm (WB fluorescent - it really was this orange), some distortion correction and sharpening, but no tone-mapping stuff. Larger and better version can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jhurrah.

Johnnie Hurrah

Johnnie, a great shot of Victoria Square, very impressive

Postcard!! Lovely.....

Great shot Johnnie.
I'd almost be tempted to photoshop out the crane on the left.

Daniel

Yes, that crane! It was the best side of the fountain to take because of that row of lights on King William Street on the left, but then there was that crane! Is it part of the dynamic cityscape to be savoured or is it a disturbing eyesore? I tried just cropping more (it's already cropped a bit on the left and bottom), but I lose those lights. I'll give it a go in PS CS2.

Here's one without the crane. This one has been made from the RAW files, the first was made from the low quality JPGs of the D50. Please see the better/bigger version at http://static.flickr.com/45/173669137_90c0bf30ed_b.jpg.

An excellent image Johnnie. Yes, I'd clone out the crane with PS.
Just noticed you did clone it out. Maybe take out the base of the crane as well?
Cheers
John

The crane base is a lot less obtrusive than the arm was. It is associated with some trickier gradations in sky colour and also some branches down the bottom, neither of which I felt likefiddling with. The arm could just be pointing to the left or away from the viewer, and you wouldn't be any the wiser.

Nice work....I am assuming the difference between DRI and HDR is the tone mapping of HDR? The DRI used here looks great, but I must admit HDR images have that 3D look, not suited to a lot of images but a good look just the same.
Roger.

Well, the techies debate this difference endlessly, and I don'y pretend to understand all the ins and outs. The above images are simply layered composites of the original "low" dynamic range images (8 bit JPG or 12 bit RAW), so the result remains at that level. I think in this instance the image is somewhat similar to the scene I could perceive with my own eyes at the time, whereas the "correctly" exposed image was a little too dark. You can take the same set of originals and use the File - Automate - HDR function of Photoshop CS2 to get a 24 bit high dynamic range image, or use other software such as Photomatix to the same end. The resulting file has such a high dynamic range that no printer or normal monitor can display it. And/Or you can tonemap the set of originals (e.g. in Photomatix) for particular effects - in effect, this is just fancy Curves. SOME of the results you see on the Web are spectacular, some are very strange. Mind you, I'm not sure that we're necessarily trying to reproduce reality with photography - I think the great masters of painting would have laughed at such a suggestion. There is a lot on the Web about how the Impressionists, for example, created the illusion of dynamic range with a palette of a few paints. A lot is also made of the days that Ansel Adams took to make prints to the same end. In summary, this was an experiment of a particular technique for a particular circumstance - changing tools for the job, as always, not sticking to one.

Johnnie Hurrah wrote:Here's one without the crane. This one has been made from the RAW files, [...]

Ah, that's better. The colours also look richer in this one. Very nice.

Daniel