HDR Photography
The benefit of teaching early morning classes: I’m finally (routinely) up for the sunrise. Even when the morning is cold and my fingers don’t want to be operating a camera, the fall and the clouds and the trees conspire to make Johnson Hall of Science (a frequent subject) look like paradise.
I suppose part of the reason that I appreciate landscape photography is its ability to capture a perfect, transient moment of incredible beauty. Of course, on some evenings (such as this one), the weather and environment just won’t cooperate. (I nearly titled this photograph “Boring Sunset.”) As photographer, I can put myself in the right place at the right time, but I still need reality to do its part.
Red fruit makes me nervous. (Perhaps one too many lectures about not eating red berries as a child?) In any case, the combination of overwhelming red fruit, dark clouds, and a dilapidated garage make me just a wee bit uneasy.
St. Lawrence University’s Johnson Hall of Science is a lovely, brand-new science building (particularly appreciated by chemists who prefer not to work in the miasma of their predecessors’ experiments.) The aesthetic benefits are supplemented by olfactory ones: in addition to excellent ventilation inside, the exterior of the building is surrounded by wild grasses and flowers that energize me the moment I step outside.
When viewed at night, the luminous quality of the glass facade lends the place a storybook look that I think HDR captures perfectly.
Motel, bar, AND diner? What more do you need? The Cascade Inn and Restaurant in Canton, NY has that feel of a building from the post-WWII boom that has remained untouched since its construction. Its charming position over the Grasse River makes it a lovely place to see the sunset.
What is “honesty” in photography? My goal as a photographer is to capture what I saw—the subjective experience of being in a single moment. I want to capture a “truth.” The process of taking a picture is projecting the reality around us onto a sensor and through myriad digital processes to create the photograph you see in front of you now. Every photographer has, in their pursuit of truth in imaging, some lines in terms of image manipulation that they will and won’t cross. HDR, for instance, is viewed as a “cheat” by some, and as a better approach to getting the true dynamic range of the human eye by others.
A less dramatic case, however, is the use of color in an image. Last night, the sky over Canton was this incredible, surreal, and otherworldly pink-orange color that was completely overwhelming and astonishing. When I noticed it out the window, I sprinted outside with my camera and captured the final, fleeting moments. I was in that moment. Nearly the same effect, however, could have been achieved with a simply pink photo filter. To me, this raises two issues:
My new academic home at St. Lawrence University has involved a serious shift from Berkeley’s urban campus to the bucolic surroundings of New York’s North Country. The gentle flower-and-grass smells waft through the campus in place of petrochemical fumes, and an the evening sun provides just the right bit of warmth.
Decaseconds 