I’ve returned from a long vacation to Northern Virginia. I’ve spent the past week at my sister’s river house on a creek that runs in to the Potomac. Her house is within 10 miles of the birthplaces of George Washington, James Monroe, and Robert E. Lee (pictured at left). So between fishing, kayaking, playing Dominoes, and sleeping in the hammock, I did some photography, too. My wife chronicled our trip better than I can, so check out her blog post here. I took HDR pictures. We missed Monroe’s birthplace, but I’ve got the Lee and Washington places here, along with my sister’s place and the new Air and Space museum by Dulles Airport. And if you don’t know what HDR photography is or how to do it, I’ve created a page that explains it all, so check that out. Now onto the photos…
rob, these are fantastic! i researched how to do this with D40 (i’ll have to do it manually as there’s no camera setting) and i’ve GOT to start experimenting. thanks for introducing me to it! by the way, what software do you use to work with these? blessings.
Carmen: Photomatix is the main program I use. Then Photoshop to reduce noise, remove chromatic aberration, crop, and more. Check out http://robwebster.net/about-hdr-photography for more details on the process.
Actually, I just found this article: http://dptnt.com/2007/10/hdr-photography-using-nikon-d40/. This explains how to manually adjust exposure, since your camera won’t auto-bracket. I’ve done it manually, too, and it’s not hard at all. Note that there’s a trial version of Photomatix available on the HDRSoft website. You could be testing out your HDR skills by this afternoon!
One more fun thing that could help, if you don’t mind dragging your laptop along: You can trigger your camera from your laptop. Then you don’t have to worry about accidentally jarring your camera when making adjustments. Bonus? You can do time lapse photography, too. There’s a good, free Mac program that does this. http://sourceforge.net/projects/camctl/. A Windows program is here: http://www.diyphotobits.com/category/download/. Both are free. The Windows one has an autobracketing feature. The Mac one, you can adjust the exposure compensation from the computer, and then trip your shutter, then rinse and repeat to get three (or more) differently exposed images. There’s another Mac one at http://www.sofortbildapp.com/ that does do autobracketing, but it doesn’t support the D40 just yet. It looks very promising, though. This tethered shooting would work well for controlled settings at home. I’m not sure I’d want to lug my camera and computer to the Air and Space Museum, though.
I’m glad you got the pictures of the Lee plantation, but if our tour guide ever found these, you would be in big trouble, mister.
WOW Rob! These are fantastic! I hope you are doing a press printed book of them or something. Stuff like this should never just “live” on your computer! :)