Other than just wanting to visit as much as humanly possible, another thing I’ve found to come out of buckling down on finishing up this Disney project recently is that it’s sort of renewed my interests in trying to improve my own photography skills.
More specifically, it reminded me how I really, really want to learn how to shoot HDR photography.
One of the blogs that I’ve been scouring religiously to help keep me motivated through all of this is the Disney Tourist Blog, not only because Tom’s trip reports are really fun to read (especially the one about his engagement proposal, which reminded me a lot of my own), but also because his photography pretty much throughout the entire site is absolutely gorgeous! It turns out that he does tons and tons of HDR photography, and the work simply speaks for itself. I wish the photos on my site looked like that! 😉
(all photos by Tom Bricker – check out more at DisneyTouristBlog.com)
As far as I can tell, I have a couple of barriers standing in my way right now – the first of which simply being, I need a better camera! My current one is pushing almost 5 years old now, and to boot is just a simple point & shoot, so it doesn’t really even have the features needed for taking the kind of pictures that I’d like to be taking. Granted, it’s a bit of a conundrum because I’ve gotten rather attached to these small, point & shoot cameras that I can easily fit in a pocket right alongside my phone and I’m not entirely crazy about having to lug something considerably bigger around, but … the verdict is still out on that one.
My other big concern is simply that of time because really, I have no idea how much post processing goes into producing images like that, and it’d kind of suck to drop $1,000+ on a fancy camera setup, only then to find that it’s another hour’s worth of tweaking in Photoshop for each image to get them looking just right. 🙁 Plus, for that matter I might not actually have the Photoshop skills if it comes down to that! I mean, I can do the basic adjustments and apply filters and whatnot, but if it involves manipulating different parts of the image in different ways or something, I don’t know. From what I’ve been able to gather about the newer cameras themselves, it sounds like the kind that I would want sort of manage the multiple exposures needed for an HDR image for you by allowing you to just set the dimensions of your bracket and then having it take and combine all 3 (or whatever) images internally … but is there still even more to it than that???
I guess maybe I need to pick up a book and read some more about it to get a better idea of what I’m considering getting into … I love the idea of having prettier images to go alongside the stuff that I write, but I don’t want to find myself diving into a full-time job just for processing photos when I also eventually have to have the time to actually write about them, too! And I’ll be honest – some days it even seems tedious to do brightness and color correction on my photos before I upload them, so I just want to make sure I’m not getting in over my head thinking that it’ll be easier than it realistically is… 😯
Still – it’s hard to deny just how cool those pictures look, isn’t it?! 😉