How do Pirates like to watch their movies? In HDR, of course.

HD Arrrhhh!!

Sorry, it’s a bad lead in to a post about the November category for the Caterpillar Photographic Society‘s monthly assignment.

The last meeting of the CatPS included Dave Bickle giving a presentation on HDR and Tonemapping to the members who were there. I couldn’t make it as I was shooting for my team (Telepost) in a pub in Longville but I know the rest of the guys and girls learnt a lot.

The presentation showed them how to set their AEB (Auto Exposure Bracketing) and take their three (or more) photos ready for overlaying in Photoshop or another tool like Photomatix. Out of the back of this, it was decided to set the assignment for the month as “HDR”. Makes sense really when you think about it. You wouldn’t show people how to do HDR and then ask them to do a Close Up or something else..

I started off thinking about where I could go to take some good HDR pictures, HDR is High Dynamic Range by the way, and thought of a couple. I’ve done some of Moreton Corbet Castle before now and a couple in some of the churches around Shrewsbury for the Architecture assignment.

Darwin’s Origin Of Piccies

The first opportunity I had to take some photos for this was half way through the month and I happened to be in town on an evening after most of the shops had closed. I thought that there might be a few opportunities to take a pic of a nice “Shut” or an alleyway. In my home town of Shrewsbury we have a multitude of little lanes or alleyways leading between the different streets or areas of the town. There’s even one by the Plough called “Plough Shut” that caused problems when the pub was actually open for business..

There were a few times I looked into the shuts but there was too much modern-day plumbing and air-con to give me satisfactory feeling about the scene. As I was walking down Pride Hill in the centre of town I noticed that one of the shopping centres had its lights on so I wondered in to take a look around. There was little that excited me so I tried a couple of photos of a stairwell and a huge open space with some lights down the centre of the ceiling. Nothing really stood out.

I looked up and found a sky light that looked reasonably interesting so I set about taking a photo of it, I had to lie down on my back to get as far away as I could from the square opening of glass and metal in the roof of the Darwin Shopping Centre. It still wasn’t far enough away, but at least no one saw me lying down, the shopping centre was deserted save for two escalator repair men.

I wondered around the centre for a few more minutes before remembering an idea I’d had previously. I started thinking about the HDR brief and figured that why not, I might get away with it. I then proceeded to look at each shop sign from Marks and Spencer’s to Laura Ashley and started taking photos of the letters in the signage that I could use. I took a photo of each of the “r”‘s and “h”‘s that I could find. What a mission, what a spud!

I can see the guy in the CCTV control room sitting there looking at this fat dude wandering around a deserted shopping centre first lying on the floor and now taking photos of the signs above the shops. He must have been a bit puzzled by this behaviour and I expected an “Oi, whatchyoudoing?” over the loud speakers, but nothing.

Ransom Note Stylee!

I considered it and thought that I would be happier to take a photo of each letter required and wasn’t going to take a photo of a complete sign and then cut the letters I needed out of that.

The following day I found myself in town during the daylight hours and continued the mission. There were many shop signs in and around the town some with all the required letters and some with one or two. There was also a number of funny looks from people as to why I might be photographing their shop sign. There were a couple on beauty salon and hair salons that I thought looked like they were worried about stalkers… I wouldn’t have been surprised if the feds had turned up to be fair.

After spending an inordinate amount of hours cropping the images, over 230 of them, and then copying and pasting them into one Photoshop image as separate layers I ended up with this!

This image in Photoshop format is 1.4GB, when I changed anything on it it used 16GB of scratch-disk space to complete the changes.

As you can see there are 180 photos in this montage, there were more H’s and R’s than D’s in the shop signs around the town. Some of the letters do not come from shop signs, there are a couple that come from my car number plate, a  painted road sign and a few off the English Bridge plaque!

Of Course!

The same day that I was out completing the shop sign photos I wondered over to Meole Brace Golf Course to take a few piccies there. It’s a Municipal course which means that any old numpty can just go wandering around. I did just that.

With Autumn here now the trees were shedding their leaves and I figured I might be able to get a couple of decent shots of trees and the large areas of open grass. The thought was that the contrast between nice and neat trimmed fairways and the deciduous trees would be eye-catching. It was too, even if I do say so myself.

The tripod was set up and the sky sufficiently moody when the light from the low sun streamed through to illuminate this solitary tree on one of the holes. I took the three photos with each being 2 steps apart in exposure bias and whacked them into Photomatix when I got home.

There were loads of other pictures that I setup the tripod for and snapped away, all the time looking out for those guys in silly hats who shout “Four” a lot.

Leaf me alone.

This one was on the way back to the car and I would have normally missed this type of photo but since getting involved in photography a bit, I’ve started noticing things that look pleasing to my eye. (This isn’t an excuse for perving either)

The trees were shedding leaves in front of me and I thought it looked nice.

There were a couple more too but I’ll leave you with one last one, all of the nature stuff around and I found a bridge interesting. This bridge is the very same one knocked off by a lorry carrying a machine to our factory, it’s obviously since been replaced and looked good with the moody sky behind it and trees either side.

The Photomatix software is good at mixing these photos up but sometimes it’s a bit overkill and Photoshop tends to be a bit friendlier to the pictures.

I think it’s definitely worth trying out both bits of software using their Demo packages to see which one suits you best. The Photomatix software is easy to use, has loads of options to tune your photos and make them look even better than you could have imagined when you took the photo.

The Adobe Photoshop software though has all of this and everything else that you’re ever likely to need ! My money is on Adobe!

There is still a week to go before entry closes so I may even get out and do some more HDR pictures but I’ll probably not add any more to the big shop sign picture. My pc wouldn’t take it..

Which picture do you like the most out of these? Feel free to leave me a comment. You can even see these and more on my Flickr photostream

Perhaps there will be a late addition to this post that I’ll submit, we’ll have to wait and see…

Thanks for reading!