While waiting for the sun to set I stood on the balcony and took in the city…from the buzz and boom, beeps and bangs of the traffic below, to the hustling bustling ferries that hurried around the harbour in front of me, to the whistling wind swirling around the 27th floor where I stood…from the bloody sunset in the east over the hazy Blue Mountains to a thunder and lightning storm in the moody clouds out over the Pacific beyond the Heads to the west…this city has a certain energy that I am loving…

So I have been trying out some HDR shoots around my new favourite part of the city, just north of the bridge. So far I think that the more the light changes (from day to night for eg) and the more images that are blended, the more interesting the results.

There is obviously too much ghosting around the bridge in the first two shots but the software is pretty good at auto blending and tone mapping the images together, better than my version of Photoshop anyway. The best current HDR techniques still involve huge amounts of time spent manually masking the layers together which I’m not keen on so I hope this can be a good alternative. Photomatix isnt as good as the human eye but it is considerably quicker and, with some more time and research, will certainly get better.

4 shot blend

3 shot blend

14 shot blend

6 shot blend

78 properties, 3400kms and a bunch of new suburbs…that was March.

Shooting properties can be a weird job…I see everything from pokey studios in the inner city to decadent mansions by the beach, and everything in between. I see inside a lot of peoples homes and lives. I have found myself in some places I would never ever normally have been in, and I guess it satisfies an inquisitiveness.

The style that is used when shooting properties in Sydney is unlike anywhere else I have worked. Technically I have learned a different style of shooting termed HDR or High Definition Range which is still in its infancy. It essentially means the end product is a lot closer to what the eye sees than a photo can usually replicate. The example above is a blend of about 10 images covering a whole range of exposures to show the shadowed and highlighted areas at the correct exposure. In some instances I find the result ridiculously over processed resulting in a painting like effect while in others it works well. It is a style pioneered in Sydney and the biggest agent here is one of our main clients and seems to love it!

You may also notice that it is always a sunny day. I can assure that it is not always sunny when I shoot!

It is also pretty evident that there isnt a huge amount of creativity involved. In a sense there is a set format and my attempts to mix it up have not been met with much enthusiasm so far. Still, it can be enjoyable work and as long as I can shoot other subjects to keep my photography interesting, I am content with it to pay the bills. It sure beats office work…

I put up some of my favourite shoots from my first couple of months in Sydney here.

HDR is short for High Dynamic Range. It is a post-processing of taking either one image or a series of images, combining them, and adjusting the contrast ratios to do things that are virtually impossible with a single aperture and shutter speed.

Cameras, by their basic-machine-nature, are very good at capturing “images”, lines, shadows, shapes — but they are not good at capturing a scene the way the mind remembers and maps it. When you are actually there on the scene, your eye travels back and forth, letting in more light in some areas, less light in others, and you create a “patchwork-quilt” of the scene.

HDR is a technique that is still in it infancy but is becoming utilised increasingly in the Real Estate industry because it enables an image to show a low light room and a high light view through the windows. I have been playing around with it in a simple form while shooting houses in NZ but I’m curious to see what else I can do with it, particularly with action shots.

Here is my first non real estate effort, it is a combination of 6 images from before sunset through to almost pitch black night. I should point out that sometimes HDR images can look pretty ridiculous and over tweaked, but I have not cranked up the colours in this image. It is simply the light from the different images all layered on top of each other.

More coming soon…