Sunday, January 28, 2007

Lanette (Winter)

Some of you who've been following this site for a while may remember this picture of Lanette from a bit ago (click to supersize 1280px wide in a new window):






Me n' Lanette went out on a photo shoot this past Friday. I wanted to get out to this location again (a glass Catholic shrine between Lincoln and Omaha) and shoot a winter version of this shot -- we got there just in the nick of time. The guy who was running the visitor center was ridiculously nice, and allowed us to stay for sunset, despite the fact that it was already 15 minutes past closing. Anyhow, here's Lanette, the winter version (click to supersize in a new window):






This was shot with a Canon EOS 20D camera with a Canon EF-S 10-22mm lens. Tripoded, 5 shots were combined in Photomatix to create this image. All tone mapping was turned to minium. The image was then saved as a TIFF, opened up in Photoshop CS2, and toned.



If you want to do HDR portraiture yourself, there are four things that are important:



1. You must have a camera capable of bracketing photos (i.e., the camera must be able to take several photos in rapid succession, each photo having a different exposure).



2. You must have a tripod.



3. You must have a model that can stand very still.



4. You must have a HDR assembler/tone mapper like Photoshop CS2 or Photomatix. (This was done with Photomatix, but I prefer CS2 generally. This was one of the few applications where Photoamtix did a slightly better job.)



Essentially, you must set up your shot, have your model pose, have him or her stand very still, and then fire off all the shots. After you have all your shots, you assemble them to create an HDR, from which you can tone-map to create a pleasing image that renders on todays monitors. I have a tutorial for doing this posted here.



Props to Lanette for once again being an incredible model!

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