Originally posted by BobRad Alex,
I second Mark Langille's comments:
From your descriptions of how you produce these exceptional photos, it sounds like you spend a lot of time at the computer. Can you give us an idea of how many minutes or, more likely, hours, you spend on a typical HDR photo?
Thanks,
Bob
It totally depends on the shot complexity (how many moving components there are, and if the shots are handheld or not how much dynamic range there is ect), but I would say anywhere from 5min, to an hour or more. The more I like the composition and lighting of a shot the more time I will take on it to really make every little detail sparkle. I must say this with a caveat though. I noticed a lot of folks around the corridors of these forums that are big RAW advocates. I myself hardly, if ever, shoot RAW, and this is mainly because I find it slow and cumbersome, and in addition, I don't have the patience to individually tweak all the RAW settings for each shot (I know you can batch, but I'm never really happy with that either, plus I shoot thousands of images a week and the space saving more than make up for the pixel peeping minute differences IMHO). The reason I bring this up is that while I will spend a bit of time perfecting my digital "art" (HDRI) I typically try to get the best JPEG out of the camera to start and then go from there, because in the end I am rather impatient.
On this note, since I am stuck inside so far and haven't been able to get out and open the throttle on my k-5, last night I laid around and got totally familiar with the menus, setup and played with all the features. I must say that I am floored by the new ability to save 5 user modes, and to be honest, don't know how I lived without it before.
As I already said, I have two of the user modes saved for high and low bracketing (check my old post for more detail), but last night I set one for low light B&W and one for low light B&W + vignette. Now, normally I would never use any incamera filters of conversions ( I loooove silver efex for B&W for example), but since I was bored last night I was just shooting my girlfriend and her cats, in basically zero light (a tv and a neon light in the room). One thing I noticed was that the really high ISO shots are totally usable and somewhat beautiful especially in B&W. They remind me of super grainy high speed film, and the in-camera filters can be combined and customized to your liking, so that you can get great stuff in-camera. In combination I can now flip to one of my B&W user modes and snap bar, and candids in super low light and have beautiful, usable images right out of camera, at the flip of a switch I am back to any shooting mode I want. I didn't think I would be so impressed with the software of the k-5, but it is proving to be a big selling point. You can essentially have 5 different special purpose cameras built into your K-5 at any moments notice.
Here is an example of a 1600 ISO shot only lit by tv light in my" B&W_vignette" user mode (all done in camera). (not a ful size image, so you can see it for the overall feeling)
and here is one at 6400. really amazing..
Hopefully today I will get out and do some intensive HDR work with the new K-5, at the very least I will do some handheld to test the speed advantage the K-5 has...