In the style of Rick Sammon

I am going on a week long trek with Rick in a couple of weeks so I have been looking at his blog style and activity a little harder this week. I like his style and may try to emulate him a little as I develop my own form of writing and blogging. Short and light but with a little content that you can take away sprinkled in each blog. One of the big things in digital photography now is extending your dynamic range with bracketed images that are combined with an HDR program like Photomatrix or Topaz Adjust. In some ways we are back to the old days of bracketing shots to ensure we get the best exposure possible. Today we use the histogram to check the exposure instead but the bracketed images of metered, +2 stops, and -2 stops gives us the opportunity to combine all three images with subtle tone mapping to give us an image with the appearance of enhanced range. The darks are thus full of detail, the highlights are also loaded with detail, and the other tones are somewhat compressed but in a way that is not apparent to the viewer. Great stuff.

Begining the Journey

The world of photography has become a passion of mine and it seems others are finding the same draw to photography. Since I have been at it a very long time I thought I would begin to share and hopefully help others along the journey.

My first camera was a Polaroid Land Camera of the bellows style where the bellows and focus rails folded up in to the body of the camera. Does anyone else remember that camera. It was black and white instant develop prints that took about a minute to process after every shot.

Although messy and not archival prints this camera gave us some of the same advantages of the current digital world with immediate visual feed back on the shot. If it wasn't what I wanted I could take another shot, assuming the moment had not been lost in the 3-5 minute process of pulling tabs, extracting the print, waiting for development, peeling the cover sheets, and putting a clear coat coating on the new print. Cool but no histogram to check exposure with.