If there is one photographer in the USA today that I truly admire and am inspired by, its Trey Ratcliffe, aka, Stuck in Customs. Trey is the pioneer and voice of High Dynamic Range photography. His work is goes beyond vibrant and enters the realm of exuberant. He’s posted several tutorials on his website/blog and in his newsletter to help educate and spread the word about HDR photography, and today, being a rainy day in Maine, I decided to have a go using some of his methods. I set up some very basic still lifes using some fruits and vegetables I had just bought from the local farmers market (would have shot the market itself if it wasn’t raining so hard!). The flowers came from my garden.

I shot indoors using natural light from a nearby window. Remember, the day was cloudy, overcast and rainy, so the natural light was quite muted and very soft. I also shot late in the afternoon, about 4pm, EST. I bracketed the shots at -2, 0, +2. I used Adobe Photoshop and a trial version of PhotoMatrix to compare the results of merging the bracketed shots into one composite HDR shot.

Below is a small sample of the results. I do love the effects you can achieve with Photomatrix. I was so easy to use, but I couldn’t have posted this without Photoshop either. What a great way to spend a rainy afternoon.

under exposed image	over exposed image	normal exposure
using Photomatrix to merge and style HDR image
Using Photoshop CS4 to merge and style HDR image
under exposed image	over exposed image	normal exposed image
using Photomatrix to merge and style HDR image
using Photoshop CS4 to merge and style HDR image
under exposed image	over exposed image	normal exposed image
using Photomatrix to merge and style HDR image
using Photoshop CS4 to merge and style HDR image
under exposed image	over exposed image	normal exposed image
using Photomatrix to merge and style HDR image
using Photoshop CS4 to merge and style HDR image

For more examples of my work, visit www.angelacoulombe.com

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This entry was posted on Saturday, August 29th, 2009 at 8:22 PM and is filed under Random Still Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.