Oh no, have I jumped on the hdr bandwagon? Not really, for while above is indeed an hdr image, it is ridiculously overdone and quite on purpose. I haven’t been avoiding hdr because it’s very popular these days, rather because it’s also very popular not to do it well.

For those not in the know, in high dynamic range photography you blend two or more photos of different exposures of the same subject to, well actually you use them to compress the dynamic range making the dynamic range of the hardware, and in the case of film, media you’re using seem extreme.yes, high dynamic range is compression of dynamic range to simulate high dynamic range. if i'm way off-base someone convince me otherwise.

I actually have featured a couple of hdr shots here in the past, but I created them in the ol’ skool way, that is blending the photos in an older version of Photoshop using layer masks and such, a time-consuming and rather painstaking process. Today’s hdr I created in seconds using photomatix, which seems to automatically add the surreal effect, at least at default settings.

Well, I just left you for a moment because I was in my head comparing quick hdr, and thereby almost all hdr examples on the web, with the paintings of Thomas Kincade, and because the above image wasn’t quite Kincade enough to make my point, I did another, in this case totally faux, hdr of the helijet in a way that evokes a more spiritual outlook:

Totally faux, I made this hdr from a single photo by making two versions off the original, one using the highlight eyedropper in Photoshop, the other using the shadow one, and then I asked photomatix to combine the three. To its credit, photomatix did call shenanigans on me, but after I told it everything was cool it happily made helicopter Jesus here in under three seconds. Where it got all those dreamy colours and the saviour decending from the heavens effect from is a mystery to me, both were utterly absent in all three source images.

what's got me sour on hdr is just how often i see it used, as i've used it here in what i hope is obvious in parody is that its trippy look makes so many folks hardly sweat compostion at all. it's all grandma likes it, let's go for it.

So what’s with me and this hdr stuff if I’m only doing it to make fun of it? Well, that’s not the reason I’m experimenting at all. What I am doing is learning the ins and outs of hdr so that on those occasions a scene truly does exceed the dynamic range of my camera I’ll know how to bracket and process the scene so that it looks lovely, on the condition that it doesn’t look like I just went all hdr on your ass to make up for the fact I’ve been taking photographs for 33 years and I still sometimes really don’t quite get the fine points of exposure. But I don’t think I’ll be using photomatix for that, that is, unless I learn how to turn down the Jesus effect.

As for my Thomas Kincade moment, well it’s just an evaluation copy of photomatix I’m using, and if you look, not even all that closely, you might just be able to see where I very crudely heal-brushed the demo copy watermark out of each photo. Were it actually important and for some reason I couldn’t actually register the software to remove the demo watermark, I would have spent the time to do it so much gooder. But then, that’s Kincade all over again, the man can paint like I could never know how. Too bad some part of his talent never whispered to him to reach for the stars and elevate his ability beyond what is really just a well-practiced craft into art. tiesto, are you listening?

Thanks for suffering both my experiments and my diatribe. It’s probably going to be a while before I post again, you see, there’s something in the air, and it may just be me.