Angeles Forest Bridge ala autochrome

I'm having fun with this process. Now to figure out how to "shoot" for maximum effect when I do go out next. Less sky seems to be the important part of the equation as one doesn't get as much of the effect in sky as one does in the mid-tone ranges. Plus the blue skies are still too blue for the autochrome look to be successful...in real life autochromes the skies tended to white out more than I can do in CS5. Ah, the foolery one must do to make an authentic image.

I like this image still even if it does have too much sky detail in it.

The complete range of steps HERE.

One more orton and I call it a day...

This area is gone now, the Station Fire of last fall saw to the destruction of much of the Angeles National Forest in the Big and Little Tujunga Canyons. Sad, but I have this little bit recorded for posterity and it will be years before it looks like this again.

gigabytes are cheap...

I had this bright idea today to see what would happen if you simply adjusted a normally exposed raw file +2 and -2 EV with the raw processor that comes bundled with the EOS20d and save myself some card space when out shooting. In theory you should be able to manufacture the exposure range needed for creating an HDR file then using tone mapping to bring about an image with detail across the board.

I found out the hard way funky stuff happens, especially when you make the conversion down to 8bits and into jpeg. You start getting noise and other bizarre artifacts that leave you with something that has colorshifted and lost detail. My suspicion is that the simple act of altering ev with a program isn't giving me the detail at other end, rather its just lightening it all up. When its married into an hdr format you pick up too much conflict and the program simply starts doing an "either/or/nor" routine. End result is a picture that is marginal in the detail picked up in the extremes of the gray scale and way too much loss of detail. More than I am willing to live with at least.

So....gigabytes are cheap do the 3 or more exposures needed and let your programs work with the date the way it was intended. An 8 gig card still takes a lot to fill it up even when shooting 3 raw images of each scene.

Anyway..from a recent photo shoot, a nice stretch of the Angeles Crest Highway. Shot RAW and converted to jpeg and smallified to fit here.