Rackham Memorial Fountain

I already blogged this picture but I wanted to add the article I wrote for the Lightsmith blog.

 

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This is a photo I created last Wednesday, taken during a family trip to the Detroit Zoo. It's a very popular photo attraction but I wanted to create something a little out of the ordinary, to show this classic feature of the zoo in a more dramatic way.

 

The weather was threatening, storm clouds were moving in rapidly and the zoo was emptying out fast. With the very high contrast between the bright areas of sky and the cloud-shaded statue, I decided to make an HDR photo. HDR (High Dynamic Range) photos combine several shots taken at different exposures to capture the entire dynamic range of a scene. For this scene I took three photos and combined them together on the computer when I got home. There was some editing involved to choose the best way to combine the photos, and the end result is, I think, very dramatic.

 

I often find that HDR is a perfect process for capturing churches (both inside and out) during a wedding, and I almost always take a few of them.

 

This is an example of a time when the post-process can effect a certain mood in a photograph. While the scene did not look like this in fact, this was the feeling I got when I was there. So in a way, this view is truer than a standard photo.