20th January 2007
Ice on the Fremont River
Zane said she wanted to go for a walk and I wanted to try out a new photo technique I had just learned about so we wandered down to the Fremont River at the bottom of my street.
The new technique is called High Dynamic Range photography and consists of taking three (or more) pictures of the same scene at different exposures then combining the pictures to get the full range of light available to the camera. This kind of image cannot actually be viewed on a monitor or printer since they don't have the range so the image is then Tone Mapped into a form that can be seen, the resulting image still represents a wider range of light than can be acquired in a single shot. The human brain is very good at doing this which is why we can see details in shadow and sunlight at the same time when in a photo they are often invisible in both.
One of the frustrations of putting pictures on the web is that have to be made smaller and compressed, these pictures look much better in their native format and absolutely stunning when printed.
© Bob Palin 2007
Icy River
This section of the Fremont River is actually fairly flat and normally just meanders along. We had just had a period of particularly cold weather with a week of night time lows around 0F and daytime highs well below freezing. This slows the river down and allows it freeze solid in places, the water then backs up behind the frozen areas forming a pond which then freezes too. The result is a series of steps, when the flow increases enough it makes a channel through the ice dam leading to a series of small waterfalls like the one in this picture.
© Bob Palin 2007
Ice Dam
One of the important requirements of HDR photography is that the three pictures have to be aligned exactly, normally a tripod is used but I couldn't find part of mine so these pictures are all hand held which has led to a slight fuzziness in a couple of them. In this picture you can see that the top of some of the branches is actually doubled, this wasn't me moving but the wind blowing them between the shots. To take the set of pictures I use the auto-bracketing feature of my camera (Canon EOS30D digital SLR) which takes the three shots in about a second.
The remnants of another ice dam a little further down stream.
© Bob Palin 2007
Ice Sculpture
This is my favourite of the HDR pictures, it's very hard to take a normal photo with the sun almost in the picture and shadows as well, this technique realy brings out the detail in the shadows while preserving the brightness of the sun. I really like the textures in the ice even if they have a slightly unnatural (or hyper-natural) appearance.
Looking upstream again, the wind was blowing a bit harder up here and made the branches quite fuzzy.
© Bob Palin 2007
Anthill and River
Zane testing the thickness of the ice, the big square block is normally about three feet above the level of the river, on this day less than a foot was visible. The pond behind the ice dam was frozen solid here, I walked across it without any problem.
© Bob Palin 2007
Zane loves to get up on a rock and look out over the country. I took many versions of this shot but she moved her head in all of them except this one, even then she did move a tiny bit which has made her head a little fuzzy.
© Bob Palin 2007
Zane's Lookout
The HDR technique can also bring out a wide range of tones in pictures and make them almost glow.
© Bob Palin 2007
Bright Rock
I've taken many pictures if this house because of its dramatic position but the front faces North and is always in the shade which makes it very dark in normal pictures. I particularly like the dramatic effect of the clouds.
© Bob Palin 2007
This is probably the most "natural" of the HDR pictures while still having a slight increase in detail. My house is just to the right of the picture, the wooden fence is on my property line which goes out to the last of the posts on the left near the neighbour's shed.
© Bob Palin 2007
The Anthill
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