I was walking around the Center for Wooden Boats taking pictures and some girl walked past me who obviously worked there.  So I asked her if it was OK to shoot and grab some shots (I know it is ok, they don’t mind – but it never hurts to ask).  So she said “Yes of course, thanks for asking” with big smile.  I guess people don’t usually ask her.  So them she asked if I wanted to shoot a picture in their main workshop.  I’m not sure if people are allowed in there but she was all friendly and offered so I jumped at the chance.

The workshop was very cool.  It was a wooden building with a long wooden bench against the wall that was covered with tools.  There was also a boat in there that they were working on  and there were sails hanging from the ceiling. At the end of the room was some guy working on something small at his desk.

I set the camera on a tripod in the corner and composed a nice shot to include the boat in the foreground and the tools and bench at the back.  This picture was five exposures all one stop apart.  (Basically I took 5 pictures starting with a very dark one, and subsequent shots with double the amount of light in each).  When I got home I put the 5 pictures into Photomatix and “tonemapped” them into a single high dynamic range picture.  You have probably heard of this as HDR.

So why do this?  Why is HDR interesting?  Our eyes are just amazing, people think their eyes have enormous field of vision which is kind of true (it’s almost 180 degrees), but really you only focus on about 5 degrees at a time everything else is blurred.  We overcome this by moving our eyes around a scene all the time.  Your eyes also manage dynamic range this way too (how much light and dark we can see), by moving our eyes, we can see in shadow areas and bright areas at different times, but you walk away remembering everything.  Unfortunately, cameras dynamic range sucks.  When you take a picture the camera try’s to expose for as much as possible, but in scenes like this where there is bright light and dark shadows, the camera will fail, there will always be areas you don’t see.  By creating an HDR image you really get to “see” what you would have seen if you where there.

That’s why I LOVE HDR.  It can turn a boring image into an amazing one.

A couple of the guys were trying to move a present today, but something was stopping them – or at least making the job much harder.