Bald Eagle

Bald Eagle
Originally uploaded by bowtoo

Every year a few pairs of eagles come down from North to the Merrimack river in Newburyport where the water doesn't freeze over completely.

I have been up there a few times to find these eagles and have mostly only seen them from pretty far away.

Today one of them came close enough for me to photograph the detail in its wings. Apparently this is a juvenile so has not yey developed the distinctive white head.

Louis CK : Everything is amazing - nobody is happy

Very funny

Bald Eagles

I have been to Deer Island a couple of times this winter to spot the bald eagles that make there way there at this time of year.  

They are driven south from Canada to the first open water that they can find as the lakes freeze further north.

The Merrimack river - about 30min drive from my house - has a section that doesn't freeze over and usually has a few of these birds hanging around.

David Sokol - a photographer I met recently posted some pretty awesome shots of the birds in a recent blog post - worth looking at http://davidjsokol.blogspot.com/2009/02/deer-island.html

Are you going to finish strong

A friend posted me this link. This guy is simply incredible.

And now time

So earlier I posted some information about using multiple exposures to extend the dynamic range of an image (and various other multiple photo techniques).

Today someone emailed me this link to a flash animated photograph. Move your mouse from top to bottom.....

Church HDR

Church
Originally uploaded by bowtoo

HDR is for High Dynamic Range.

Digital cameras perform somewhat poorly compared to film with the range that they can handle between the darkest and brightest areas in a scene.

To overcome this, some software called Photomatix (built into Photoshop or separately) allows you to take multiple images with different exposures and then compress the range between the brightest and darkest. This results in an image that shows exposure closer to what you saw with the naked eye.

Over-processing yields images that have an unrealistic or surreal feel to them and invariably the image has a flatter tonality to it.

In this image without HDR you would have an unnaturally dark foreground and church building (if you expose for the sun) or you would lose the color and details of the sun completely if you exposed for the foreground.

Combining digital photographs is now possible in all three dimensions: vertical or horizontal using Photoshop or PTGUI (to construct panoramas) depth (using software like Helicon Focus) plus this fourth one (that of exposure).