Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Full Spectrum of Color


Last night was idyllic in Newport Harbor.
The winds were steady but respectful. Sometimes the winds give no consideration to a gondolier, treating him like a second-class citizen, but last night the wind seemed to say "I understand your effort, and while I still need to gust here and there, I respect you. Have a great evening".
The sky was clear, and after the sun touched down in the distance, we began to notice a thumbnail moon.
The progression of colors passed through to whole spectrum, at one point treating us with purple water under a burnt-orange sky.

The only unfortunate thing:
there's no way my camera could truly capture the magic of the perfect moment.

1 comment:

Tamas Feher from Hungary said...

> The only unfortunate thing:
there's no way my camera could truly capture the magic of the perfect moment. <

There is something called HDR, which is fasionable nowadays among photographers.

Essentially the digital camera takes several shots in quick succession, with a different exposure setting for each frame.

The data is then fed into Adobe Photoshop CS2 or newer and combined into a single "high dynamics range" image.

The result looks surreal or even computer-generated for its perfectness and captures an incredibly wide range of shadow, light and colours under adverse lighting conditions, although the result often looks a bit "metallic".

You do not need to have a very high end digital camera, some have consumer level models have unofficial support for this method.

If your memory card is fast enough the camera may be able to take 3 (rarely 5) shots quick enough to prevent ghost image problems, provided the gondola is not going too fast and there is no grade 7 storm going on...

Here are some examples:

St. Louis Arch

Locomotive

(There are a lot of HDR photos on the englishrussia.com site, s well.)