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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Varalakshmi Vratham (pooja)

Today was Varalakshmi pooja.(see previous posts from 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008. Even this blog feels old now!

We had a nice evening at home with friends and family.

This being a function for the ladies, the girls were ecstatic as usual. Multiple dress changes, good food, chit chat , (daddy learning about a few new iPhone apps from his friends).. all said and done a great time!

Here is the defining photo for this year's function

En raaasaaaathiiis..

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HDR attempt 1 - stone egg on granite

A rock that my friend Maria gave me a long time ago for my 25th Birthday.. has always been lying around in my shoebox... realized that it had the same color as our granite countertop!

This is a composite of 6 shots with f4.0 to f9.0

there will be more subjects and more pictures by sunday.

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Doravatharam

What is there to say?

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Yosemite - stitch shots

There are only two stitch shots worth sharing from the Yosemite trip..

The first one is a vertical series of the Vernal falls

Second one is a horizontal sweep of half dome as the sun set behind us. The sun puts a clear shadow of other side on the peaks and it is one of the most amazing sites we have seen in any national park.

Yosemite is a god send..

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