Family Portraits (HDR)
The story of this photo
150 years ago, photography was a totally different thing. Photographers would haul around huge and heavy cameras and use flash powder. In those days, photography was an adventure and photographs were something special to have. Not everyone could afford to be photographed. Today, everything and every place has been photographed at least a thousand times. Does that devalue photography?
In the digital age, with iPads and iPhones, photos tend to come in the thousands. They get buried on large storage media, and they hardly ever get printed and hung on walls or placed prominently on a table for everyone to see.
Do you still print photos? How do you display the photos that mean something to you? Do you have them on your iPad, in a printed photo book, or framed and hanging on your walls?
How it was shot
- Taken hand-held
- Three exposures (-2, 0, +2 ev) – autobracketing
- Camera: Nikon D7000
- Lens: Sigma 10-20mm F3,5 EX DC HSM
How it was tonemapped
- Preparation: developed the raw files with ACR mainly in order to reduce the CA [details]
- Created two additional exposures in ACR (+4EV and -4EV) to preserve highlights and shadows [details]
- Applied noise reduction (Topaz Denoise) to each of the source images [details]
- Resulting TIF images were then used as input to Photomatix
- Tone-mapping: Photomatix Pro 4.1 (Detail Enhancer)
How it was post-processed
- Post-processing was done in Photoshop
- Global levels layer (fine-tune contrast)
- Global saturation layer (master)
- Saturation layer (toning down the reds in some areas
- Levels layer (darkening the reflections on the ceiling)
- Levels layer (darkening the reflections on the table)
- Levels layer on the black parts (darkening)
- Saturation layer on the black parts (slight desaturation)
- Levels layer on the photos (more contrast)
- Saturation layer on the photos (desaturation)
- Sharpening using the high-pass filter method [details]
- Slight vignette effect [details]
wOw’zer wOrk Klaus as usually BrAvO !!
Awesome.. 🙂
Terrific HDR. Yes, I’ve learned to take single shot camera raw files and creating multiple exposure using ACR. Not quite the same as actually shooting using auto bracketing but it’s close.
Beautiful work as always!!!
Top notch work as always! I think sometimes we have to realize that less is more, we’re so used to photography these days that most people have become numb about it as a form of art and expression.
The other day I visited a friend, as he show me his new house he also showed me the story of his life (he’s about 63 years old) on every wall he had pictures from different times of his life, from the moment he was a little kid (B&W medium format film pictures) to recent times now that we’re living in the digital era.
Once we finished the tour not only I knew his new house but I knew my friend a little bit better that before we started the tour.
Unfortunately most of us simply take the pictures and archive them in our hard drive, when in reality pictures should be in the open and tell a little story about you and your story.
Cheers!
Bonjour
I’m new to HDR and….learning a lot from those elaborate explanations.
Lot of know-how and outstanding pictures in this instructive website.
Robert, photo enthousiast and new owner of Nikon D7000, 18-200mm.
Au revoir and many thanks.
nice
Love everything about the picture except that slight slant of table stops me from absorbing the rest of the shot.