First round HDR

Here is some fake HDR, more on the subtle side. I didn't have a tripod, so all of this is just digital. I think I'm going to finally buy a cheap tripod tomorrow (It's kind of silly being a photographer in Paris without one) and get some actual HDR shots. I wandered out to the park today and, despite almost no sunlight, was able to get some so-so pictures. It's just frustrating to me because what I saw through the viewfinder was so much more magical than what I see on my computer screen, with all of it's complexity and detail. There are two solutions to this. One is to accept that my camera takes poor pictures of reality. The other is to make my photos match my imaginative eye with the GIMP. See, a camera is rotten technology compared to the human eye. You have to expose a shot for either the sky or the grass; you can never have both colored correctly in the same picture because they have different brightnesses. However, with HDR you take three different pictures that are identical except for the exposure levels and then use software to combine the images. The result can be much closer to what the human eye sees... or you can push it way beyond that point to get stunning effects. That is where photography is no longer photography- it's digital art. So these pictures represent a gentle step into the world of photomanipulation. The neon leaves actually aren't HDRed at all. I just ran some filters over them. I've been doing that for years. The forest shots have various attempts at combining filters with general HDR theory. Oh yeah, and I post the leaves only for their general prettiness. It started raining on me as I was laying on my back underneath them and I got a bunch of water drops on the lens. Wrecked a perfectly good shot... oh well.