Steve the photos look wonderful. I envy your for your talent and patience in making the most out of your photos. My head's gonna explode from working with my polar bear photos in PS3!
Yvonne - at the risk of stuffing more info in your head ... If this is too much just make a note of it for future reference.
One of the things that you become aware of as you start working with photographs is that eyes and cameras are very different. The eye is a very complex organ and from the receptors in the eye to the neurons in the brain that process the information from the eye there is a lot that happens to interpret the information. In contrast, the photosensor in a digital camera is very dumb. It simply records what is transmitted to it from the camera lens, recording red, green, and blue in tonal values ranging from 0 to 255.
Now, one of the big ways that the eye differs from a camera is in the ability to differentiate among shades of dark and shades of light. When we look at a scene that has high contrast - for example a stream flowing in the bottom of a deep shadowed canyon with snow-capped mountains towering overhead - the human eye adjusts to the scene by increasing the sensitivity of the light receptors in the retina that are focused on the dark shadowed areas and decreasing the senstivity of receptors that are receiving information from the snow on the mountains.
A camera is dumb. It can't make those adjustments. So in a high contrast scene if you adjust the camera to catch the details in the snow and the bright sky, the shadows in the canyon turn completely black. But if you set the camera exposure to pick up the details of the rocks, trees, and water in the canyon then the snow and the sky turn pure white.
In photography the solution is HDR processing. HDR stands for high dynamic range. In a setting such as I described, the photographer takes a series of pictures of the same scene, with the set of exposures bracketing the dynamicn range from the bright sun and snow to the dark canyons. The software then merges those, making the sorts of adjustments that the human eye naturally makes.
Because the most intriguing natural photos generally involve high dynamic range, the ability to do HDR processing is critical if you want to really create pictures that capture that same sense of
Aha!!! that caused you to grab your camera and shoot that picture. If you're like me, you've gotten tired of getting prints back that you look at and feel disappointed because they just don't do justice to what you were looking at at the time. That's what impelled me to start to investigating how I could show in my photos what I was trying to capture in the first place.
If you're feeling overwhelmed right now, don't worry about HDR. Just know that it exists and that it's a way of working with photos to improve your ability to represent bright brights and dark darks. Then when you're ready to move to the next level, you will have an idea of where to start.
Thanks so much for the compliment, but your photographs are fantastic... That one from Denali is gorgeous, love the colors. So you bought Photomatix? Did you get the 15% discount? (If not, you should contact them and ask them to apply it retroactively.)
