Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I took a brief break to go for a walk today, and because I wanted to try some HDR experiments I took along my camera (just a cheap, half broken Canon PowerShot SD550) and a little tripod. There's a break in the fence around the tracks across my street so I figured that taking a picture of the old ironwork Toronto Junction bridge was as good an experiment as any.

The photo on the left is a combination of six shots, and the photo on the right is actually just a single photo with heavy level adjustment. The camera has a pretty good dynamic range as is, so with a bit of hand-tuning you can certainly “fake” HDR results. Both of them were done manually, rather than using Photoshop's HDR merge functions (because either I'm too dumb to figure them out, or I'm too good at doing things manually to respect them — plus on my main computer I'm restricted to GIMP and WINE/PhotoShop 7 which doesn't have those features anyway).

The main difference from my point of view in doing it the two different ways is that on a single image, you have zero issues with camera or scene motion between shots, but on the other hand, with a single image, digital noise (which can be reduced with multiple shots) can become a problem.

Well, back to the real work that I've been dreading… Rebuilding a database. I'm hoping I can just abort this process that's crashed, move everything back into my buffer directory (BME has four stages of image processing — unprocessed, processed and buffered, ready to be posted, and posted) and hope I can just restart the build.