A bouquet of roses - HDR Photography

Yesterday, our friends got us a bouquet of roses for the pooja. They are really beautiful roses and have a rich variety of colors.

The photo crazy idiot that I am, started taking pictures of the flowers. The colds were captured but somehow the depth of the roses were not coming out on the JPG's.

Then thought of using the HDR software and shot a series of pictures with the tripod and set it to a 2.4 second exposure with a range of aperture settings from

4.0,4.5, 6.0, 6.3, 7.1, 8.0, 9.0, 10.0, 11.0, 13.0, 18.0, 20.0

and then using the software superimposed select pictures to get a High Dynamic Range (HDR) image from this subset.

Sure enough, the image takes on more depth and gets the bright and dark ares of the roses to have the same amount of detail..

Here are two such composites.

One with almost all of the aligned images..

and one with a smaller subset..

Two realizations at the end of the photo editing process.

1. HDR is the closest I have seen a photograph capture what we see with our eyes.

2. Our eyes are way ahead! Way way way way ahead than any camera or software. God is the most brilliant camera maker! He provides us fantastic subjects like roses and fantastic images to our brain, courtesy of some amazing cameras, our eyes.

The fun continues tonight. Planning to go to my all time favorite, most photographed architectural subject in the bay area tonight..

No marks for guessing what that is!

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Jasmine strands

Jasmine flowers, (Jaadhi Malli) stringing explained.

Thanks to grandma for the demo!

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Once upon a place

Time has nothing to do with it.. the sun comes up, sun goes down and years roll by.

Location, location, location it is as far as getting certain things like "oru mozham poo" (a hand length of strung jasmine flowers)!

We have four Jasmine plants in our house. They bloom over a very narrow time period and give us lots of flowers during the last two weeks in April. The four females in the house will treat these flowers like a precious commodity, pluck every little jasmine they can, take hours to string it, even save the flowers in the fridge in ziploc bags so it will last them a couple of more days after the plants stop flowering.

Note, there is more flowers here than hair on the little one's head, and she fought to keep it all for herself!

Jasmine's in the air!

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Backyard Hues

Backyard blues turned to backyard hues, thanks to the camera, the sun coming out just after a drizzle and getting me back to thinking

Yep. Tommorrow brings a new beginning and a new day!

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Birds and the bees...

A misleading title for this post!

This is a photoblog of the animals, birds, flowers from the recent Route 1 trip...

It was interesting to say the least...

Seagulls white, brown, Pelicans, Pelicans, more Pelicans, seals, sealions, bunch of cactus (have never seen these before)...

There were some other birds by the sea. Crmorants, falcons, slender legged birds with long curved beaks, too fast or too far to capture on camera!

I never knew there was this much to see. Realized that having your eyes open and seeing are two different things!

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