HDR tutorials on the Internet

I’ve been thinking about adding my own HDR tutorial to this site.  I’m slowly writing it down, but it will probably be months before I’m satisfied with it :). But since there are some really nice ones already online, here are links to few of them:

• Stuck In Customs HDR tutorial – a great place to start, covers all the basic and some widely used plugins
• Vanilla Days HDR tutorial – I started with this one, a great tutorial
• Places 2 Explore HDR tutorial – another, different view on the subject
• Golden Sieve HDR tutorial – includes extensive info on HDR and videos with complete walkthroughs
• Brian Matiash HDR tutorial – includes a lot of info also on taking photos and managing your images

There are many more, but these are the ones I liked the most :). They all have a little different approach to HDR. Quite often, in one you see that you shouldn’t do something, and in a second it’s the way to go :)

I think the best way to start, is to try them all and than decide which parts of them to use, for your own photos.

Sunset over Borinka

I almost thought that I take no photos this weekend. After a whole week of warm weather, it started raining on Friday. But luckily the clouds scattered on Saturday and I could fulfill my plans :). I went to ruins of the Pajstun castle, from where you have this lovely view of the surrounding area.

HDR from three shots, taken with Canon 450D with Sigma 10-20mm lens, from a tripod

HDR Spotting

I add a lot of my photos also to HDR Spotting (http://www.hdrspotting.com/). I had most of my photos featured, but never selected for an editors’s pick.  It’s a really great place to find other HDR photographers and to see some amazing HDR works.

As it still is in a beta state, you need an invite to join. I still have few of them unused so if you are a HDR photographer and want one, just leave me a note :)

Decay

Some months ago, there was a very heavy fog in Bratislava, so I went out to take few pictures. I found this car parked just few streets from my flat. I really wanted a strong contrast look for this one. I punched the details quite a bit, I left the noise as it was and then run it through Photo Tools to add more details and adjust the colors.

It’s also a little more “artistic” look, than my other photos, but I really like to experiment, trying new techniques and plugins :)

HDR from three shots, taken with Canon 450D with Sigma 10-20mm lens, handheld.

First 10 000

I just hit my first 10 000 views on my smugmug portfolio (hdrshooter.smugmug.com). Smugmug really count visit much differently than flickr. The first 10 000 on flickr took ages :)

Thank you all for visiting :)

Abandoned

Interior shots are still a little harder for me to post-process. I can’t really get to the point where I want them to be. This one I edited maybe 10 times, each time I updated how I process my photos. But now I think is quite passable :) (but still can get better :) )

HDR from three shots, taken with Canon 450D with Sigma 10-20mm lens. Photo taken at the abandoned military base at Devinska Kobyla above Bratislava

Wallpaper

A lot of searches, coming to this site include the word wallpaper. So I decided to add another section, with some of my photos formated for normal and wide screens, to be used as wallpapers. For now I added 4 photos, but I will ad new ones later.

They can be found here: Desktop wallpapers

Disappearing Road

Just a simple composition here. As it was quite away from the main road, there were very few cars on this road, and I could take this shot.

HDR from three shots, taken with Canon 450D with Sigma 10-20mm lens. I took this photo right next to the Cerveny kamen (Red stone) castle in Slovakia

100 cameras in 1

For the last couple of days I have been playing around with Trey Racliffs Iphone app 100 cameras in 1. Since I only have an Ipod I’m just editing my older shots, to see what result I can get.  So here are few of them:

I quite like that you can stack the filters on each other, to get really different results. The filters “the sky wept in crimson waves” and “when I felt sad, and you were not there” quickly became my favorites :) (and yes, that are really the names of the filters :) )

Its a really nice app and you can get great and very interesting results from it. To get more info about this app, go here: http://www.stuckincustoms.com/best-iphone-camera/

I’m going to post more later on :)

Red and Gold

Still have a few unpublished photos from last years fireworks at Kuchajda lake in Bratislava. Let’s hope this year I have same luck for great shots :).

As probably all fireworks shots, this one is also only from a single RAW file. Before the fireworks started, I took few test shots, to get the time needed, so the surrounding are not absolutely dark in comparison to the fireworks. Then I took the shot on bulb mode with a remote, trying to stick to a similar time.

HDR from one shot, taken with Canon 450D with Sigma 10-20mm lens, from a tripod.