This was a day of boredom.   Gale was away so I walked around the house with the 50mm lens and took some snaps of all of her weirdness.

There is a project that’s been around for a few years called 365 Project which I have tried and failed at twice.  You are suposed to upload a picture a day.  It’s a great way to get creative with photography, but really hard to find new things when your life revolves around work and watching TV.  This was before instagram when selfies, pictures of your lunch and your cat became the norm.

I tried for a while a few years ago and this is what I did.

I can’t say I’m an expert, but I have played around with HDR in the past.   Now that we have Photoshop CS6 we have a lot of new tools to play around with.

HDR is a method of capturing a greater dynamic range between the lightest and darkest areas of an image.

Cameras aren’t all that good at seeing in dark and light at the same time.  They can take one of the other and you lose a lot of detail in either end of the range.  They have a low range as it were.   Imagine if you could take several photos each at a different shutter speed and get a range of images showing all the detail from the dark areas up to the light areas.   That’s where HDR comes in.   Most modern cameras have a bracketing setting which automatically takes several (3 in my case) photos at the same aperture, but at three different shutter speeds.  I end up with overexposed, normal and underexposed pictures.

The middle photo is what I would normally be left with.  but the clouds are blah and the ground under the car is too dark. PS CS6 (and maybe 4 and 5) have an HDR option.    Photoshop takes the three images and looks at the light and dark areas to come up with the average photo.  And it looks pretty average.  Very flat and grey and washed out.    But this image now has three times the information that a normal photo would have.  This gives you more information to play with.  Bring out more colour, brightness, sharpness.  Playing around with the settings can eventually produce something like this:

It looks slightly surreal, but that’s kinda what we’re going for.  See how you can see under the car, but the clouds are still grey.    As you can tell from above, if the clouds show at their true greyness then the underside of the car is too dark.   Google HDR and you’ll see a range of images from photorealistic to pretty surrealistic.  Almost all photos in magazines and commercials use HDR.  If your camera has bracketing and you have photoshop, or photomatix (which has a free cut down version) I really suggest you try out HDR.  It’s amazing what you can come up with.

I read an article at lunch time that said how a 50mm prime lens could be your new best friend.  I have been using Gale’s 28-135mm lens, which I love.  But it does have the draw back that it can only go to f5.6.    But why would I want to limit myself to a fixed focal lens when I can currently zoom in and out to my hearts content?  Not to mention it has an image stabilizer.

There’s a British Comedy where a character was talking about not having a zoom lens.

“How do you bring distant objects into sharp focus?”
“Just move your head closer to the object.”

A good point, and the added bonus of a fixed lens is a wider aperture.   So I’m seriously thinking about a 50mm lens.   AS LUCK WOULD HAVE IT, Gale HAS a f1.4 50mm Lens that she says I can borrow.  A wider aperture gives you a shallower depth of field, which can also be pretty handy.  Since I just made a cup of coffee, I have my subject ready and waiting.

Here’s a shot with my (Gale’s) trusty 28-135mm.  at around 60mm 1/10sec and ISO 100.  Not amazingly in focus and at f4.5 not a very shallow depth of field.  (Click on the image for a full size version).  I probably could have zoomed in to 135mm and got less depth of field, but I wanted a similar comparison.

Here’s one with the 50mm f1.4 lens.  Taken at 1/25sec still ISO 100 and it did have a circular polarizer too, hence the reduced glare.   But ignore that.

Neither image had an unsharp mask run on them, which I normally do, but I did correct the colors since I took both shots in RAW.

In both cases I focused on the front lip of the mug and you can see how much shallower the DOF field is with the 50mm and how much sharper the sharp bits are.  AND just look at the bokeh (the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light), how pretty are they?  (Again click on the image for a full size)  You can see how clear it is.

I’m going to use the lens for a month.  My New Best Friend?  Ask me in June.