Lately Dr. Hyperbolus and I have been going on hikes almost every weekend from Griffith Park to Malibu. Dr. Echo Bloom joins us sometimes, but sadly he will be departing to SF in just a couple weeks. Anyway, this past weekend TMFJ (Tom-motha-fuckin-Jones) was in town and we decided to conquer the Hollywood Sign hike. The path we took was a good 3 mile hike up and took around 70 minutes to reach.

View Hollywood Sign Hike in a larger map

Now, you can’t actually rub noses with the sign. It’s fenced off and there are fines/jailtime for trespassing. But you do end up around 100 feet behind it, and it’s still totally worth it for the awesome view of Los Angeles.

So, I wanted to test out some HDR photography again… however this time just using the technique to keep all the details in the shot. The first photo, Behind Hollywood, is a single exposure, but all the others used some sort of multiple exposure. Burbank uses traditional 3-exposure HDR and was created in Photomatix and Photoshop. The other two, Observatory and TMFJ in Hollywood use two exposures that are manually blended together in Photoshop.

Malibu Canyon

A couple weeks ago, Dr. Hyperbolus and I were on the search for an iconic shot of a single tree on a hill. We drove around for a few hours (traffic mainly) and ended up on Malibu Canyon Road (probably our next hiking location). As we were driving, we finally spotted our subject on the side of the road and quickly pulled over. Here she is.

I used 3-exposure HDR for the first two photos shooting directly into the sun and then just a single exposure on the last shot to complement the series with a blown out look.

The idea is to use bracketing, which is commonplace with most of today’s fancy cameras. You shoot one image at the correct exposure, then at least one overexposed (to see detail in the shadows), and at least one underexposed (to see detail in the highlights – typically the sky). I usually work with just 3 exposures, but I’ve seen some people use up to 7… and of course, more exposures = more detail.

HDR imagery seems to be the new trend. A lot of people are getting into it… but then again there are a lot of people who hate it and think it’ll eventually phase out. I personally like it. It’s fun and the results are usually pretty cool. The style can range from super realistic, highly detailed scenes to fantastical, painterly dreamworlds. I tend to dig it all.

Here are some of my recent attempts while on vacation in Atlanta:

LEFT: original, MIDDLE: HDR, RIGHT: HDR B&W using red color channel

LEFT: original, RIGHT: HDR

And these are some older shots I took while in Albany. Because of the dirtiness of the area, I tone mapped these images to be a bit gritty and added some grain to complement:

I still have a lot to learn about HDR and how to achieve those mystical dreamworld images. I also I need to get a tripod so my images are sharper. So stay tuned for more to come in the future.

Anyway, here are some of the HDR masters:

Ryan Eng and Pete Carr (with one of my favorite shots).