Wild Art: Photos of the new Union Station, Farewell Mr. Bush and Matthew and The Arrogant Sea

by Laura Seewoester

This week we have a variety photos from around town, including the new Union Station, some more pics from the La Reunion tree carving event, a few great shots of Matthew and The Arrogant Sea at Hailey's and more from the Farewell Mr. Bush Exhibit (which, oddly enough, included the piece myself and Laura Evans submitted to the exhibit - the baby shoes). All images were submitted by members of our Flickr community.

Tips and Tricks

We have had a few images submitted recently of people playing around with HDR imaging, so I thought I would provide a brief explanation and how-to. HDR (or HDRI) stands for high dynamic range imaging. Creating an HDR image gives you a larger range between shadows and highlights than with a regular digital picture. For those of you that have worked in a dark room, the outcome is similar to the difference between fiber paper and regular paper. The basic idea is to merge three photos together, an evenly exposed, under exposed and overexposed image, to get all the different gradients and bring out the best of both the extreme highlights and shadows.

How to do it: My instructions on creating an HDR image require Adobe CS3 (because that is what I use... obviously I cannot test out the technique on a program I do not have). You can do it, albeit with a little more difficulty, with CS2 and with Lightroom (I think Lightroom has made it easy.) If you have come across any good how-to articles for other programs, please post in the comments.

Step 1: Find your subject and bracket, taking 3 or more photos of that subject with different exposures. Make sure there is at least one underexposed and overexposed. If you do not have an auto bracketing feature on your camera or want to take longer exposures set up a tripod so each image is framed exactly the same. CS3 has a feature that helps align images that are slightly off, but it only works when they are slightly different.

Step 2: Download your photos (obviously) and open up Adobe Bridge. In Photoshop on the tool bar there is a small button that says "Br" and if you click that it will open Bridge. Select the bracketed photos you would like to merge holding the shift or command key (so they are all selected) and from the toolbar choose Tools>Photoshop>Merge to HDR. This will automatically open a merged file in Photoshop. It will take a second to open. Patience is a virtue.

Step 3: A box will open. You will notice you can select or deselect the images to be merged. This is useful if you are using more than three photos, you can play around with it and select the images that look the best. Then hit "OK."

Step 4: The image will appear much like any image file you open. Now go to Image>Mode>16 bits channel. A box will pop up giving you all kinds of fun things to mess around with. Select from the drop down menu "Local Adaptation." This is where you will adjust the shadows and highlights to your liking. It takes a bit of getting use to, so move the line around into all kinds of curves until you like how the image looks. Don't forget to set multiple points on the curve, and be familiar with your step backwards key so you don't mess something up and can't figure out how to get it back. When you are done messing around with it hit "OK" and make any other changes you want using your regular tools.

Step 5: You have to change the image into an 8 bit channel before you can convert it into a jpeg. That's it. Easy as pie.

I am new to this process, so if anybody has any other advice for those trying out HDR imaging for the first time, please let us know in the comments below.