For a long while, I've wanted to use Photomatix, a program that helps to make great 'HDR' (High Dynamic Range) pictures, but couldn't afford to spend $100 on it. I finally found out that students and educational customers can get the whole program for $30, so I bought it. I take a lot of outdoor and indoor pictures that have very bright and very dark areas, and HDR can make those pictures look spectacular!
What is HDR? Basically, it goes like this: no digital camera or computer display can record and show every level of brightness and darkness in some situations (like when you're taking a picture of the shady side of a building with the super-bright sky in the background). So you can either (a) take a 'RAW' picture with your camera (as I do in my example below) and make multiple exposures from it, or you can take a series of pictures, each one a certain amount brighter or darker than the first. Then you use a program (like Photomatix) to combine the differently-exposed pictures into one picture with all the shadow and bright areas exposed correctly.
I went outside a few days ago on a beautiful spring day, with a lot of ominous clouds in the sky, and switched my D40 over to RAW mode and took a quick snapshot of the seminary from the back baseball field. Without Photomatix, I could make the picture look pretty good by simply adjusting it in Photoshop (I have CS, but hope to get CS3 sometime soon...), using Levels and the 'Shadow/Highlight' adjustments:
But you can make the picture look much better by taking the RAW file and making a few files out of it (one that exposes for the Seminary building, and the other that exposes for the bright clouds in the background), then combining these files using Photomatix:
Notice how smooth all the textures are, and how the picture is completely well-exposed, without any very bright or very dark areas? That's the power of HDR. There are tons of examples of HDR photography on the Internet, and I hope to make some more HDR photos in the next few years (and not only of areas around the Seminary...). There are more than a few chapels and churches in St. Louis that would look absolutely amazing with some HDR work!
I posted pictures of flowers growing on trees and in the ground around the Seminary. Spring is a wonderful time for someone who likes taking pictures of the beauty of new life in God's creation!
(Can you see the bee?)
(Does anyone know the technical term for these flowers?)
For the third year in a row, Cardinal Glennon College held it's 'German-Irish Day,' a day (more like a few hours) of friendly (and not-so-friendly) competition between the seminarians with more German heritage and those with more Irish heritage. Since I'm a blend of German/Irish/Dutch/French/Etc., I was on the German team this year.
First we played kickball - here's the victorious Germans, cheering on the seminarian at the plate:
And here's a picture of the trivia contest (also won by the Germans):
Thanks to Fr. Cronin (the college director) for taking pictures during the kickball game—I was playing on the field, so I could not take any...
In other news, spring is most definitely here, and I'll be posting a group of floral/tree pictures within the next week or so on my pictures page (link at the top of this page).
