Sunday, September 16, 2007

More than meets the film

The human eye is exponentially more adept at discerning a range of light than film or digital camera sensors. By themselves, camera can only capture a fraction of what the eye can detect. That's why the scene that looked absolutely wonderful to you when you pressed the shutter button comes out too light or too dark or too contrasty.

Photographers try to compensate for the camera's limitations by augmenting the amount of light through flash or through the use of filters or computer enhancement. I've posted some photos that are the result of taking several exposures of a scene at different settings and blending them in PhotoShop, a computer image editing program.

This weekend I had the opportunity to do a lot of shooting and experimenting with my exposure blending technique. The photo above is from Defiance Lake in Moraine Hills State Park in McHenry, Illinois. Three exposures were taken of the scene - one for the sky, one for the middleground water and one for the foreground grasses and reeds. The results is something very close to what I actually saw while standing on the lakeshore.

More to come this week.

Photo represents a range of about 8 stops of light. Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2007 James Jordan.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Beautiful image, great technique.

Hillary said...

THIS is why I sooo want to get Photoshop! Gorgeous!

Wanda said...

Oh this is unbelievablely gorgeous~!!

Kim said...

Absolutely breathtaking shot James!