Located in Northwest Wisconsin, my goal is to capture your life, your adventures, your everything.A few weeks back (actually it’s been just about a month – I’m running really behind on my “for fun” photo editing), my buddy Panda and I took a drive heading west out of Menomonie with no destination or plan but to enjoy one of the first really nice days we’ve had this year. Of course I did have a slight ulterior motive and brought my cam along. I have been following a lot of HDR photographers/blogs/Flickr groups for a while but never really played around with it much. It’s not that I don’t LOVE messing with photos using all the digital tools we have available nowadays – I just – well – never played with it. Fail Erik I suppose. lol.
Our journey westward took us to the famed Mississippi River where we made stops in such scenic cities as Maiden Rock, Stockholm and Alma (among others). I brought along my spare camera so Panda had something to play with while I lugged around my favorite Manfrotto tripod and my ol’ faithful 40D. Thanks to technology (mainly RAW and auto bracketing) – capturing truly inspiring HDR imagery is actually not as difficult as it once was but you still need a good eye. I’m still working on that one. 
I suppose a short explanation of what HDR is would be appropriate. lol. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. I’ll point you to the Wikipedia article for a more technical explanation (Wikipedia rules so hard!). The definition I give when trying to explain the concept to people is as follows: When you take a picture, you typically expose for the main subject area of your image. You can see this easily when taking a picture of a friend outdoors and they look fine but the sky is blown out. When creating an HDR image, you take several pictures exposing for the different areas of the scene you are capturing and then using software such as Photoshop’s built-in HDR processing or as I did with Nik Software’s HDR Effex Pro plugin, combine that data into a single photo. The human eye is without a doubt the best camera ever made but with the proper images, software and patience, you can create some amazing images. Depending on your settings that image can be photo realistic or swing far on the pendulum to the hyper realistic. I feel just from the images I’ve played with thus far that my personal artistic preference definitely leans towards the hyper realistic. Not a big a surprise. haha
So with that I present some samples of my first dabble into this rather intriguing area of photography. The technique is time consuming and really doesn’t work well for moving subjects however I just tried it again at a wedding I shot this past weekend and am very excited to see the results!
View more pics from the day on Facebook!
Share and enjoy!
Cheers!
Erik
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