Most famous for its wintry activities of world-class skiing and figure skating shows, posh Idaho mountain town Sun Valley also boasts spectacular hiking and mountain biking. Enjoy this collection of photos of a Sun Valley summer!
Photomatix is one of those photo-processing pieces of software where once you’ve seen the results, you can easily pick out the photos edited with it ever after. As a tool for what’s called “tonemapping” (in simple terms, equalizing shadows and highlights to bring out as much detail as possible), it produces extremely distinctive, painterly, vaguely surreal results…like the following images.
Castle-like buildings on the Yale University campus in New Haven, Connecticut
Ready for a new installment in beyond-the-average-exposure photos? Today’s the day! (To learn more about HDR and how you can try it yourself, check out Digital Photography School’s three-part series on how to get started. They also have beautiful examples of HDR done right if you’re in need of further inspiration.)
Montana's Mission Mountains
Have you ever been disappointed with your photographs of tricky areas such as canyons and cloudy vistas because only a few sections of the images were properly exposed? The sky looks fine but the ground is completely in shadow; the ground looks fine but the sky is a blown-out swatch of white. There’s a way around that, and that way is called HDR, or high dynamic range images.
The idea is that if you take several different shots of the same landscape (preferably with your camera on a tripod for consistent images) at several different exposures and merge them all, proper software will pick the best exposure for each area of the photos, creating a stunning, perfectly-balanced image: no details lacking. Of course, not everyone wants to take several different exposures of everything they photograph, and there’s a way around that: if the lighting wasn’t too tricky to begin with, Photoshop has tools to “tone” single images HDR-style, producing comparable stunning results.
But why the long explanation? Well, I was itching for a new photo collection series, and when I fine-tuned my HDR-processing settings to a point where I knew I could make a bunch of older images really pop, I had my new series ready to go. And since these images have a fairly different look than the usual photos, I thought I’d explain why. Enjoy, be sure to click on the images to view larger versions, and (all together now) keep an eye out for future installments, because we’re nowhere close to done!
Winter in Stanley, Idaho
