Discovering HDR and My First Set of Photos

I dont know how I came about it online, but I was reading about an interesting form of digital photography called HDR - High Dynamic Range photography. It is mainly useful for capturing difficult scenes, such as a big city at night, forests with a lot of contrast, or anything with very bright and very dark lighting in the subject.

What I found to be interesting is that some photographers will use this method of capturing subjects and add their artistic touch. I started by going to a local township park, armed with my little GE X5 camera and a tripod and snapped between 5 and 8 snaps at different shutter speeds from well under exposed to over exposed, combined them in Photoshop and added some Photoshop effects. Some images I tried to make look realistic, but in some, I got some really cool effects.

Take for instance this picture.  This consists of 8 images stacked, with a few effects added.  To me, this looks like an artists rendition of the chapel, like what one would find on a 1960's vintage postcard.

There was a wedding the day I took this image, so I had to wait until the wedding party left to take this image.  While I waited, I took several other pictures in the park.  These were all taken in Boardman Township Park just south of Youngstown Ohio.  For a township park, it is fairly large, with a lot of good subject matter to experiment with, so I took a few more as I was waiting for the church to be ready for a picture.

This photo of the gazebo in the park was the first image I had taken, and also was the most difficult to process.  I just couldnt get the lighting, saturation and the background glow quite right.  Again, this one looks like an artist's postcard.

I thought I would do something a little different to this image of the Veterans Memorial.  Here I adjusted the lighting to make it appear as though it was taken at night, except the brightness of the stone suggests otherwise.  I also blurred the entire image except for the stone.  In fact, if you expand the image, you can even read the writing on the stone itself.

These next 2 images were done with no effects and are straight photographs.  This image was shot with a low f-stop to get the focus effect that you see here.

In this next image, you can see the  effect of HDR as it was meant to be.  Look at the detail in the shadows under the bush on the right side.  The twigs and mulch are plainly visible and almost stand out from the image.  Normally, this would be too dark to see this amount of detail.

This last image is a picture of a maintenance shed in the park.  I saw it from a distance and thought it would be a nice subject for a picture.

The effects here are very slight, but for some reason, like the photo of the gazebo, I could not get the flowers and grass toned down.  More experimentation is definitely needed on some of these pictures.  Remember, these are the first images I have done using this technique, and once I figure out how to do this properly, I'm sure the images will get better.  I thought this technique is pretty cool, so I thought I would try it, and overall, for my very first photos, I thought they came out well enough to actually start a blog for them.  Keep watching, there will be more images to come.