It’s Sunday night and I’m leaving in the morning for a month-long trek on my motorcycle. The plan is to roll back to Minnesota (from California) with my dad for his 50th high school reunion, then split off and solo up through the Canadian Rockies and back down the west coast. The thought of a month on a moto gets me a wee apprehensive until I remind myself that I’ll never be more than a few hundred miles away from a Starbucks or a Walmart (shudder).

No, this is not a gear sponsored trip. Nope, not planning on timelapsing all 5000+ miles. Not even sure I’m going to take a camera other than my iPhone. I want to truly experience this trip instead of frantically trying to capture every second with thin-sliced DoF and hasty slider moves. I think sometimes it’s OK to just live in the moment and not worry about visually mediating the moment to others.

It will be challenging, maybe even numbing at times, but I’m definitely expecting an adventure. If you want snapshots from the road or the occasional update sprinkled with snark, follow me on Twitter: @jesserosten

Trying out a fun little app on this trip called Instamapper. As long as I have cell service (which might not be too often thanks to AT&T) you should be able to see where I am on a map. Special prize if you’re able to catch a pic of my bike. Here’s a shot of the BumbleBeemer all packed up and ready to roll. Why, yes, those ARE pelican cases on the side. Thank you for noticing.

(It’s a BMW R1200 GS for all you oilhead boxer fans out there. Thanks Lyn for the help with the pic. )

Got some great projects coming up when I get back. Ciao for now!

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Let’s talk about HDR. If you don’t know what HDR is, congratulations. Clearly you live in the real world and don’t spend much time online. Bring yourself up to speed by doing a quick search for the tag “HDR” on Flickr; you’ll find thousands of examples. Some of them are good, a lot of them are not so good. HDR is like the Sarah Palin of photo techniques, you either love it, or you hate it. Either way, it’s possible that your passion is misplaced. You see, HDR is not the culprit, it’s what you do with the HDR that creates the love-it-hate-it images.

First let’s define some terms. HDR means “high dynamic range.” That’s all it means. In the purest sense, there’s no such thing as “bad HDR.” High dynamic range isn’t good or bad, it simply is or isn’t. You CAN have high dynamic range and higher dynamic range, but you CAN’T have good high dynamic range, and bad high dynamic range. It doesn’t even make sense grammatically.

So how much DR before you can call it an HDR? Well, it’s relative. But in photographic terms, it’s safe to assume an HDR is any image that contains more dynamic range than what can be achieved in a single exposure. By taking multiple exposures, one can expose for the entire range of light in a scene and merge all that dynamic range into one, single, juicy, 32-bit, high dynamic range image. And you’ve got no way to view it.

No, seriously. There’s no way to view your 32-bit HDR cause there are no 32-bit display devices. Your computer monitor is only 8-bit (or 6, in some cases). Viewing a true HDR image on your computer monitor is like looking at a picture through a cardboard tube – you can only see 8 bits of it at a time. This is where tone mapping comes into play.

In order to display a 32-bit image on an 8-bit device, all those extra bits have to be squeezed, bent, tricked, and otherwise coerced into an 8-bit container. And just like how the alien bug from
Men in Black squeezes into his “Edgar suit,” the result is not always pretty. This Bendy McTrickybits process is called Tone Mapping. There’s good tone mapping and bad tone mapping (subjectively speaking, of course). Many people over do it by cranking the tone mapping to eleven. This what gives “HDR” photography a bad rap. But, remember, you’re not looking at an HDR image, you’re looking at a tone mapped image.

Now that we’ve got that all cleared up, lemme talk about this quick clip. I saw a video online recently of some “HDR Tonemapped” scenes. The gentleman who put it together referenced about 5 different pieces of software he used to get the effect. Seemed like a lot of exporting, importing, and reassembling. Being the workflow junkie that I am, it got me thinking, “there’s got to be a better way!”

The below clip was slapdashed together using only the shadow/highlight filter in Premiere (also found in After Effects). I’ve included a screen shot of my effect settings. Some people like this look. I don’t really, or at least not in the amounts that I’ve used it above.

Go, play. See if you can make something that actually looks good with tone mapping. You don’t necessarily need a crazy workflow full of still images and obscure software. Just use the shadow/highlights filter. But beware: scary, ugly, noisy monsters live in the shadows of your footage. Especially if you’re shooting HDSLRs with its less-than-ideal compression. It falls apart really quickly. Love it or hate it? Feel free to sound off in the comments.

Here are a few spur-of-the-moment shots from the local skating rink. We threw this shoot together very last minute with the help of a Facebook casting call (don’t forget to follow via Facebook and Twitter!)

I first tried setting up the light on a stand and had the skaters roll by as I shot. This yielded horrible results. I quickly realized that I needed to get the camera and light rolling along with the skaters, at a consistent distance, to get consistent focus and exposure. Well, it just so happens that I spent a good portion of the ’90s roller skating on a weekly basis. Yes, I was THAT kid. I skated in front of the subject and had an assistant (thank you Jeremy and Lyn) on wheels skate along side holding the flash (580ex, shoot-thru umbrella, triggered via PW). Shooting blind meant I shot a lot of frames and hoped to get some keepers. Doing a photo shoot on roller skates really got me wondering how much more efficient my life might be if I could wear roller skates all the time. Imagine how fast shopping at Costco would be with a pair of skates.

1. I love visual storytelling.  This can take on many forms, film, commercial, music video, photo, or animated piece.  

2. I love light.  Light is, after all, what creates an image in the first place.  

It’s safe to say that this blog will most likely cover anything that falls under those two topics.  Which is a round-a-bout way of giving myself license to cover anything under the sun.  Feel free to RSS subscribe to the blog so you can be notified of new posts.  If you’re not using RSS you are missing out.  Or you can stay up-to-date via Facebook or Twitter.  Thanks for stopping by.  And, hey, let’s be friends.

-Jesse

ps. I grabbed some of the more “industry related” content from the old blog and republished it here.  So while the blog is new, there are some entries from last year.