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Daily HDR Photo — iPhone HDR: Himeji Castle
An iPhone HDR?! Is it possible? I’ll explain in a moment, but let’s have a look at the photo first.
So today’s shot is of Himeji castle, the white heron castle, a world heritage site and the most beautiful of all Japanese castles.
I talked about Himeji a bit here when I posted a nice black and white of it, so go take a look at that. But I’ll repost the photo below if you just want to see it and skip my words.
About the shot
So how in the world did I do the above shot and why do I call it HDR? Well, the answer is that it’s not a real HDR photo. More of a pseudo-HDR. It is tone-mapped, which is what gives it the HDR effect. Tone-mapping… HDR.. lots of terms.. I’ll go into this in a bit more detail in an article I’m working on about HDR photography in general. Look for that soon.
I’ve recently been allowed into the beta of Photomatix 4, which is the most popular and best program for generating HDR. One of the interesting features of the new version is that it allows you to tone-map regular jpeg images. This opens the door to all kinds of things.
The iPhone is not a bad camera. Not a great one, either, but enough for decent — even good under ideal conditions — photos. Mix in some careful editing, and you can really make some nice images from it.
In addition to the HDR-effect, I gave this one a bit of a tilt-shift effect. What do you think? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
Photofest Japan
If any of our readers are interested, there is a 3-day photo workshop in Akihabara in 3 weeks. There will be 3 pros there giving various classes: Juan Pons, Hal Schmitt, and Rick Sammon. I’m a huge Rick Sammon fan, so I would fully recommend going to this event just to meet him.
Anyone interested should visit photofest where you can sign up. The nice guys behind this event ask me to tell you that any signups include a free dinner with the pros on the 29th. Sweet! Check it out. If you do sign up, be sure to mention you heard about the event at JapanDave.
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More Himeji
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