Half Dome Fantasy

[compilerbitch]

Half Dome Fantasy, originally uploaded by M0n0chrom3.

I've had this image sitting on my hard drive since my trip to Yosemite last summer. I never quite managed to render it in a way that I liked because it had too much dynamic range, but I recently experimented with the HDR tonemapping feature of CS2 (that I didn't know existed until recently). Basically, I loaded the 14-bit raw version of the image into CS2, changed bit depth to 32, then back again to 16, and the tonemapping dialogue appeared. A bit of fiddling later, and some minor dodging and burning and hey presto. :-)

I'm going to experiment a bit more with HDR techniques and probably write an essay on it when I have some interesting results, but so far I'm impressed with the possibilities. Not many people seem to do HDR black & white, but I don't see any reason why it shouldn't work.

Comments

[tea-cantata.livejournal.com]

Mmmmmmm. Am lacking in technical vocabulary to explain why I like this a great deal, but I like the stark contrast between the "dark" sky and the light foreground, and the sort of Van-Gogh-ian texture of the grass in the very foreground.