THE BEAUTY AND POWER OF HDR PHOTOGRAPHS

April 8, 2008

I am endlessly awed, humbled, and inspired by human creativity. You can say any amount of bad about the species, and much of it would be true, but there is imagination and vision within each one of us that is stunning to behold.

Meet Xavier

I have realized that I notice very much how things look. A bit less, how they smell. Hardly at all how they sound. Not how they feel. How they taste? I don’t care enough, or else I’ve just replaced that care with a stronger concern about overall nutrition.

Now, my excellent brother-in-law, Xavier…he comes from France. He sees food everywhere. You think you’re on a nature walk, and next thing you know, his pockets are stuffed with mushrooms, the kids are all picking the berries he’s found, and everyone is getting a lesson on the edible properties of sea asparagus.

Go to the beach with the man, and he’s requisitioned the childrens’ sand buckets to collect crabs. He’s wading barefoot in chest deep water with a bucket brimming with live crabs in each hand, on slippery rocks at high tide. Don’t ask me how he finds the crabs, but find them he does, as big as your hand. He’s trained the children to find miniature shrimp in the tidal pools, so all 10 of them are lying on their bellies, fully concentrated on catching shrimp.

Once home, you may ask him for his recipe for Crab Bisque. The first words out of his mouth are “How much white wine do you have?”. Maybe one day, he’ll share with us his recipe for Seafood Chowder. It is astounding. He says that everyone is this way in France, that the whole culture is food-obsessed. I can hardly imagine it.

He cares about taste. Me, I care about anti-oxidants. People like me must be a frustration to him. He’s a chef, you see. He has made a career out of playing to his strengths. Though I have tried, I cannot get this excited about taste. It is not one of my strengths. I am grateful that we are all different. I wish I could see Xavier far more often and watch him light up about food.

Your own gifts

Have you ever considered which of your senses influences you most? The question is not which works best, but which sense provides you with the information you care most about? It’s a type of self-discovery. It’s good to know your aptitudes, the special gifts that only you have. What lights your fire? What could you talk about for hours if anyone would listen?

In The Oprah Magazine’s excellent March 2008 issue, which was so impressive that I wrote about it here , you will find the article “5 Things Happy People Do”. Point Number 1 describes living a life based on your own true talents to discover solid, lasting happiness. Lying on a beach is just passive contentment by comparison.

As I look down the path of my future and wonder what to put there to love every day, I have realized that it will be something that stirs and inspires my visual senses. I am just beginning to catch a glimmer of what it might be. It’s taken 47 years. I wonder how many people get it right the first time, like Xavier.

One of the reasons I love my computer is because it brings me so many arresting and moving things to look at. In the next part of this article, I want to show you some photographs that blow me away.

HDR pansies

Shockingly beautiful, don’t you find?

The photograph, and all those that follow, are linked to their Flickr source pages.(Do you know Flickr ? It’s a phenomenal place where people share photographs.).

Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine (SM) is a site dedicated to creating beautiful, usable websites. They canvas the internet to bring you the tools that inspire and teach. The graphic design features, be it beautiful fonts or spectacular desktop wallpaper, and the tutorials on how to create the code that makes the site, are brilliant. I spend hours there because there is always something remarkable to look at, with instructions on how to make it.

Have a look at this article on 35 fantastic HDR pictures , from March 10, 2008. Remember that you are looking at photographs.

HDR Paris

Computer image processing techniques are used to create HDR (High Dynamic Range) photos. By adding a wider range of values between the lightest and the darkest to normal digital photos, you can better replicate the huge variation in real-world light intensities.

Through these pictures, and in so many other ways, my computer allows me to see the world through the eyes of another. Can you imagine that there are people who always see the world like this? If I practiced, could I see the world this way, without the software?

The photos in the article are all so out of this world that I bet you’d need 15 minutes to decide on your favorite. I chose this one :

My favorite HDR photograph

The Flickr No Holds Barred HDR pool and the other links at the end of the SM article, will take you to many more HDR pictures. What is it about these photos that makes them more interesting than 3D? Why do they raise the hair on the back of my neck? They evoke more emotion than regular photographs. Is it because they stimulate more of our senses ? You can smell the sea, you can feel the fur, you feel a little unsteady on the old bridge.

HDR cow

The result is awesome to look at. I try to only use that word when I really mean it. As the SM article intro says, “the effect is to blur our sense of what is reality and what is illusion”. These photos have much more than simple visual appeal. Reality and fantasy are all edited by our minds, anyways. We see it as we want it to be. Take an active role as the director of your own movie.

Posted by Christine Scaman | Filed Under Love My Computer