HDR Photo in Late Afternoon

I still play with HDR occasionally. I think that it has some potential when it’s done well. Too often, though, the results look like rather surreal:

It’s an interesting effect but I’m not sure one can still call it photography at this point.

Today I took a photo of the front of my workplace in the late afternoon. Normally, when the sun is low in the sky, the other side of the building is in deep shadow, as this normal exposure shows:

HDR produces a characteristic flattening of tones when it brings up the details in the shadows. I tried for a more natural result in this photo (gotta watch that halo-ing!). Photomatix was used for the HDR image generation and tone-mapping. I’ve never gotten the hang of HDR tone-mapping with Photoshop CS2, which also takes a much longer time to generate the 32-bit image.

The last time I tried HDR, I used a Canon Powershot S5 and Photoshop. I think I’m getting better results with the Rebel XSi and Photomatix.

Almost every HDR tutorial I can think of has been collected on Tutorial Blog.

Going to the Dogs

My knitting, that is. I don’t own a dog and probably never will. I’m more of a cat and small rodent person because I’m lazy and cats and rodents don’t have to be walked. But I do like dogs. Friends asked me to knit a dog sweater for their minpin (truthfully, she’s more mini-mutt than minpin) because it’s so hard to find dog sweaters in Israel.

I started the dog sweater just before Yom Kippur, using the Magic Loop techique, which allows you to use a long circular needle in place of double-pointed needles or a short circular. After the first couple rounds, handling the twisty loops becomes much easier, but I confess that I switched to 16″ circulars after about 6 inches. I would definitely use this technique if I had only long circulars (which tend to be the only circulars readily available in Israel) but I can knit much faster with small circulars and double-pointed needles. So it’s a useful technique and I’m glad to have learned it, but I will probably use my painstakingly gathered collection of small circulars and dpns in the future.

I knitted 3/4 of the dog sweater, loosely based a pattern posted by SpunKnit. In the end, I ripped it out and started over with a larger needle. The original size, with the doubled Sirdar Snuggly Double Knit, produced a very dense sweater. Laura said she wanted a cosy, warm dog sweater, not a bullet-proof vest.

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On a different note, we’re well into the Jewish holidays. Yom Kippur was yesterday. I came through the fast without a headache, although I’m a caffeine addict and I don’t bother cutting down before fasts. Lucky physiology, I guess.

As I was getting my morning cup of espresso and frothed milk in the cafeteria, I took this picture:

Where else but in Israel would you find a stack of pamphlets on the religious laws of Elul (last month, a month of repentance and introspection) beside the cutlery dispenser in a work cafeteria?

Gmar tov!

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