Gallery: Portland Japanese Garden Revisited

I’ve had reason to revisit some photos from a visit to the Portland Japanese Garden in Portland, Oregon I made in June 2009. I invite you to take a look at some “new” HDR images from the gardens in the gallery linked above. I’ve also posted a few comments about the set below.

What is HDR photography?

I’ve mentioned the technique a few times on my blog before. Basically, when there is a great deal of difference between the brightest and darkest parts of a scene, cameras, especially digital cameras, cannot always respond to the full range of light. Some parts of the image will be very dark or others will turn completely white. This results in loss of detail in the shadows and the highlights. Sometimes a photographer can use this to his or her advantage, but sometimes it isn’t what one wants. HDR photography is a technique that combines multiple images at different exposures to capture much of that range in brightness and then compresses or maps it into something that can be displayed or printed with conventional media. There are potentially many options for how this can be achieved, and a variety of styles one can work toward in a final image. I’ve had some interesting results in my foray into HDR photography so far, and rather like the technique in appropriate circumstances.

New Software

As a user of their other photography tools, when Nik Software announced they were creating an HDR processing tool, I was intrigued. A few weeks ago they released HDR Efex Pro. I had to give it a try. I reached back into my photo library to find images that I could make some use of, and the gallery above is one of the results. There you will see 6 different photographs, some in multiple versions, processed through HDR Efex Pro with a variety of choices and styles (and sometimes additional digital darkroom work). Most of these were photographs I had previously abandoned as producing unsatisfactory results. The new software has enabled them to be useful images, and with greater flexibility. In the gallery you will see images that are striving for photorealism, images that accentuate contrasts and textures, and ones that go after a surreal, dream-like quality.

I’ve also created a page that shows some comparisons between the non-HDR basic “neutral” image and one of the HDR results. There you can see how conventional digital photography can be significantly limited in these high dynamic range situations, and how HDR techniques can bring out much more of the scene, even turning a photo that would be quickly scrapped into something to share. You can view the page here.

Some of these images are somewhat experimental, exploring options available, so some are bound to be more successful than others.  I hope you find them interesting, at least.