Just four poster style photos from around Shanghai as I’ve been finalising various arrangements.

Hopefully some more serious work over the next few weeks as I travel with my students.
]]> http://mitussis.net/2009/03/21/shanghai-poster-style/feed/ 2 http://mitussis.net/2009/03/02/tone-mapping-ok-images-from-bad/ http://mitussis.net/2009/03/02/tone-mapping-ok-images-from-bad/#comments Mon, 02 Mar 2009 22:27:12 +0000 Darryn Mitussis http://mitussis.net/2009/03/02/tone-mapping-ok-images-from-bad/

I went to Matlock and Matlock Bath on the weekend, both being Victorian towns in the Derbyshire Dales, the latter being an old spa town now very popular for motorcyclists to visit. The weather was lovely and some of the scenery great. Unfortunately, my photographs were nothing to write home about.

Board with trying to tinker with the photos to make them realistic and presentable, I decided to do the opposite, using the HDR software over-saturate the colours.

The effect is almost cartoon like and rather fun. Three of these are from Matlock Bath and one on Jubilee Campus from a few weeks ago.

I have had a few additional moments to experiment with the high dynamic range software. The technique does make the photographs much more like the eye experiences (and compensates for the lack of dynamic range in my camera’s sensor).

This photograph was taken in Kyoto on a busy street corner. The red lights are from the taillights of passing cars. I call these Jedi moments. One of my favourite Jedi moments was taken in Athens. You can see that photograph here.

The second photograph is from the window of the Equatorial hotel in Shanghai. Again three photographs merged. This one was taken resting the camera against the window frame (with the window open).

It is possible to tweak the settings to get almost surreal effect.

While the clouds in the photograph above were impressive, they are accentuated somewhat here. The red on the tower is also stronger that it appeared to my eye.

I have some more detail on the technique here.

In a quick break between marking / doing admin, etc., I’ve made a couple of moments to post some photos from my trip to Yunnan (now about three weeks ago).

There were a couple of posts about this, where I tried to describe the scenery in and around Lijiang. These are probably more manageable than my tortured prose.

This photograph is of the Yak Meadow about an hour drive from Lijiang and a cable car ride. It and the adjoining Birch Meadow are smallish planes in the forest, surrounded by mountains. There is a boarded walk around Birch Meadow, quite busy with a stream of tourists (mostly taking photographs with their friends and families blocking most of the scenery).

On the day after we visited the meadows and mountains above, we went to Tiger Leaping Gorge. On the way we passed through some lovely countryside, mostly agricultural.

In the photograph above, we see one of the villages we passed, surrounded by fields of I’m not sure what. The colours were particularly stunning, orange clay soil, clear blue skies with white clouds. It was, a reminder that the planet was not originally surrounded in haze and smog.

The countryside we passed through skirted in parts the River Yangtze, much, much smaller than it is in Chongqing, Wuhan or Nanjing, where I have also seen it. The colours were somewhat reminiscent of parts of Australia I have visited or, I’m guessing the dryer parts of France or Spain.

The photographs above are each three photographs with different exposures merged with some high dynamic range software. I wrote a post on the subject here.