359/365 - Jim - Butler County Courthouse

( f/22 18mm HDR ISO 100 Nikon D300 )

This is the Butler County Courthouse in downtown Butler. It was a very gloomy and overcast day, which results in pretty blah photos. So what do you do? Bracket a bunch of photos and turn them into an HDR. It really takes a nothing shot and turns it into something. I think this looks like one of those old postcards that were shot in black and white and then colorized.

352/365 - Jim - Pond Fountain

( f/22 32mm HDR ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

This pond is just down the road from my house and I have been wanting to take a picture of it for a long time. I've always liked house that sits there too. Over the last 6 years, they have added the rocks and some landscaping around the pond and then the fountain. I pulled Jameson in his wagon all the way there and the fountain wasn't turned on. I was a little disappointed to go all that way and not see the fountain. I'm not sure if the owners saw me taking photos or it was on a timer, but it suddenly turned on and I was able to take some fountain shots. I bracketed 7 shots and then merged 3 of them into an HDR. I set the HDR effect to it's lowest setting, but turned the strength and saturation all the way up. You can see the leaves are turning a little already. Kind of sad to see summer ending.

244/365 - Jim - Storybook Cottage

(10.5mm HDR ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

We got our kids a playhouse on Friday from Craigslist. Jameson has been enjoying it thoroughly. I wanted to get some shots of the inside so I put the fisheye lens on. Then I bracketed 5 shots and turned this into an HDR image. Our house was behind the little house, so I very roughly edited it out with Photoshop. I didn't spend much time on it because the second Pens Stanley Cup game is on. I'm going to get back to the game now.

180/365 - Jim - Oil Change

( f/13 10.5mm 2 sec ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

I only took 3 photos today. This one was done quickly while I did an oil change on my Honda Accord which has over 100,000 miles on it. It was really dark, so I decided to HDR it to bring out the details. You can even see the oil draining.

174/365 - Jim - Machine

( f/16 31mm HDR ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

My son Jameson likes "machines" so I took this photo for him. I went down to a bridge and railroad tracks to see if I could get either of those, but it turned out there wasn't anything very interesting. On my way back to the vehicle, this loader/backhoe was just sitting there, so I took 5 shots at different exposures so I could do an HDR. It's not very interesting, but it was all I got today...

153/365 - Jim - McConnell's Mill

( f/18 24mm HDR ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

I went to McConnell's Mill today to get a photo and take some video with my new camcorder. It was so cold! I lasted about 20 minutes before my hands were frozen. It was very overcast today so none of my photos looked very nice and I knew that would happen, so I put my camera on a post and took 5 bracketed photos. Then I created an HDR with them. If I post a video, I will link it here.

129/365 - Jim - Nautical Lantern

( f/11 35mm HDR ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

This is a lantern that goes on the starboard side of a boat. Starboard is the right side of the boat if you are on it facing toward the front. The starboard side of a boat is a green light and the port side is red. The reason for this is in a situation where 2 boats are crossing each other. The right-of-way is given to the boat that sees the green starboard light on the other boat. Reversely the other boat must give the right-of-way because they see the red port light of the boat crossing. Confused? Anyway, I don't remember where I got this exactly, but I thought it was cool at the time. The photo is an HDR that was rendered with 5 photos of varying exposure.

030/365 - Jim - Railroad

( f/22 24mm HDR ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

Theme is vanishing point. One of the most common vanishing points I can think of is train tracks. I knew I wanted to go down to my closest tracks and get a picture. What I didn't know was that it would be snowing. Boy was it cold! The sun wasn't very good and every shot I got looked very drab. I ended up laying the camera down and bracketing my shot. Then turned it into this HDR. It worked better than I thought.

023/365 - Jim - My Home

( f/11 10.5mm HDR ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

Theme is home. Matt mentioned wanting to do an HDR image of his house. I figured I would do the same. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and is a technique that gives an image a better range of light and dark areas. That means it can lighten the dark areas and darken the light areas. To do this photo I put my camera on a 7 frame bracketing setting and the exposure to 1. This takes the first picture at regular exposure, then changes it making the shutter speed change. For this image the shutter was between 1/30 and 2 seconds. Then a program merges all those 7 images together and allows you to change the strength of dynamic range. It has become really big in photography lately. Anyway, this is my home taken with my fisheye lens from under the tree. Looks like I need to get the rake out.

023/365 - Matt - HDR home

( f/4.5 18mm 1/80 sec ISO 200 Nikon D40 )

This is my home with an HDR effect on it. It looks cool in my opinion and I need to do more HDR photos. The white paint underneath the shutters is from our old white shutters we had and the paint ran off of them. We are all too lazy to fix it so oh well!!! Also, I don't know all of the information about this picture because I deleted the original and the photo won't list the f/ or the seconds. SORRY!

008/365 - Matt - HDR Tree

( f/5.6 55mm 1/200 sec ISO 800 Nikon D40 )

This is one section of a tree in my backyard. It is about 6 or 7 stories high and has been there since I was born. I wanted to get a complete shot of the tree, but I was not satisfied with the pictures. So, I decided to take a picture and generate an HDR image with Photomatix. It came out pretty cool. Let me know what you think...