South Mountain Sunset

Recently Amy got a new camera for her birthday. It is a DSLR, which for those who are acronymly challenged means Digital Single Lens Reflex. It’s a nice way of saying that you look through the viewfinder and it uses a mirror to direct your view directly through the lens of the camera, so you see exactly what the camera will shoot. When you press the button, voila, the mirror moves out of the way and the image falls directly onto the film (or in the case of a DSLR the CCD or other imaging circuitry). A more complete description of this process is here on Wikipedia.

But I digress. The point is that Amy’s birthday present is way cool and since it is a real DSLR it has allowed me to try something I’ve always wanted to do (ever since I’ve heard of it), which is HDR.

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. A good explanation of what it is is here and here, but basically it allows you to shoot multiple shots of the same image at different exposure levels and combine them all using the computer to show a lot more of the color and detail of an image than what you could get with just one image.

The image attached to this post is from 3 photos I took while standing on the path near our house that overlooks the golf course. It turned out pretty well I think. It looks unreal even, but a lot of HDR images typically do since it is often fun to crank up the color saturation to get incredible colors in the HDR image.
Some more HDR images from the same session are here.

Anyway, much, much fun. Can’t wait to do this at Kinkakuji next month.