One of my favorite photographers (and rather infamous for her rise to fame through flickr) is Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir. Her story is one of hard work, cold Icelandic nights and finally, fame.

Probably what she is most famous for, are her “clone” shots, and the Toyota Prius advertising campaign that she was awarded due to her shots.

She was recently interviewed by officialproductions.tv – but they appear to have taken down the video of her interview.

What’s up, guys?

This last week, while visiting Rebecca’s relatives in Georgia, I experimented with a photographic concept called HDR photography

Simply put, cameras don’t have quite the color/luminance range that our eyes have. So when you’re photographing a scene which goes from intense brightness to intense darkness all in the same scene – you either have to sacrifice the dark in order to see the light part correctly – or sacrifice the light part in order to see the dark part correctly.

HDR photography attempts to deal with this issue bracketing several exposures +- some amount of F-stop, and then blending the three-or-more images together to create the finished product.

The downside to this technique is that there is a fair amount of post-processing required. This makes HDR photography ill suited for photojournalism, etc – places where the desired outcome includes no post-processing.

It was suggested during my HDR research that HDR photography was more like capturing a memory, since it closer approximates how we remember a scene, and after some playing around, I am tempted to agree with this – there are certainly ways to get a good shot in-camera without all the fancy tricks, but then again – sometimes you want to capture a mood that is hard/impossible to light.

Let’s talk about post-processing.

This is the part of shooting that I find rather dull. I know it has to be done, but I don’t enjoy it nearly as much as the actual shoot.

Sure, when you’re done you have an awesome product in your hands. A tangible result of the blood sweat and tears that you put into the shoot.

As I am perfecting my workflow, it is getting a little easier to stomach. The hardest is working on panorama shots and HDR shots. Yes – when the result is done, they sure do look nice (if you have good source shots). So maybe it’s a workflow issue. 🙂

Anyway, I’m almost done processing a friend of mine’s photographs. Some of the panoramas turned out absolutely gorgeous, and some of the HDR’s didn’t.

That is the luck of the draw, though – it seems.