Thursday, December 6, 2007

Elephant Seals and HDR


Jon Canfield led the class about 30 miles up the coast to the Piedras Blancas elephant seal rookery. If you have never seen these unbelievably large marine mammals, it is time to visit. Great information may be found at www.elephantseal.org

It is still early in the "active" season but we witnessed multiple battles between Alpha bulls, juveniles playing, and a whole bunch of sleeping.


The images displayed today are high dynamic range (HDR) shots of the seals. I took three exposures of each subject (0, -2, and +2) with a hand held Canon 40D and 100-400 lens. The shots were combined to a 32-bit HDR file and processed with Photomatix Pro. After processing, the resultant 16-bit TIFFs were returned to Photoshop for additional work.


We are back in the digital darkroom today covering the Lightroom print module. By later in the day, the lab's 2400s, 3800s, 4800s, and 7800 will be humming.

Hal







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