Merry Christmas

Christmas Tree HDR
Originally uploaded by theowl84

Merry Christmas 2007 to all of you and your loved ones.

HDR Tutorial for Canon EOS 400D

Schlossberg Stiege in Graz
Originally uploaded by theowl84

In the last weeks I had some time to experiment with my new camera. One of the reasons for buying it was the possibility to use the Auto Exposure Bracketing function (AEB). This setting can be used to let the camera shot three pictures with different exposure settings.

I use a mini tripod and the timer function to avoid any shake of the camera, especially for night-time-HDRs. I'll give you a small tutorial about how I do it:

• Mount the camera on a mini tripod
• Set the camera into Aperture-Priority (Av)
• Get into the menu "Camera 2" and set the AEB to -2/0/+2
• Change the shoot mode to self-timer to delay the shutter by 10 seconds (press the button below the AV+/- button to do this)
• Find a nice place for the camera where it can stand on it's own. You must not touch the camera when the shutter is open.
• For some scenes it's good to manually change the basic exposure to an adequate level (This is necessary when the brightest picture is too bright or the darkest picture is too dark)
• Then press the shutter button and wait 10 seconds for the camera to start shooting. It will make 3 successive shots automatically.

• The setup should now look like the screenshot on the right.
• After the pictures have been taken you should review all pictures and assure that all details are at least visible in one picture (for example very bright objects should be clearly visible in the darkest picture)
• If you are not content with your picture series, manually change the basic exposure and re-shoot the entire series.
• Now you can load the pictures to your PC and use your favorite HDR software to create magic pictures.

A few examples

You can see many other HDR pictures on my flickr page.

Photography is becoming a new hobby

University Glass House in Graz
Originally uploaded by theowl84

I'm becoming better at HDR photography and I decided to buy a new camera. Once you start playing with advanced techniques, a normal camera like my Sanjo J4 is not sufficient anymore. That's why I'm going to buy myself a Canon 350D SLR camera.

Experiments with HDR

While using flickr I stumbled upon a new method to shoot pictures. It's called HDR (high dynamic range) that merges pictures with various exposure settings into one. This way dark and light areas of the picture will be displayed with many more detail.

The picture above is one of my best pictures with HDR so far. I went to a church nearby and took some picture. It is a composition of three pictures to make the walls bright as well as the window visible. A single shot would either be under- or overexposed. You can see more of my HDR pictures on my flickr page.