The name of this post means more than meets the eye, at first, at least to me. While I was initially captured by this scene because it reminded me of one of my all time favorite movies, Cool Hand Luke, it was one particular scene in the movie that screamed “shoot this scene now”! Yep, you guessed it: the scene in which the warden discusses the various infractions that would cause a prisoner to have to “spend the night in the box”. And, of course, once you’re in the box, you can’t forget Alice in Chains’ ‘Man in the Box”. While all of that song’s lyrics are perfect for what it might be like to get locked in this particular box for a night or two, it is one line in particular that spoke to me as I processed this image tonight: “Won’t you come and save me…”
So now all of you are scratching your heads, “what in tarnation is fotofreq talking about, ‘won’t you come and save me…’, anyways?” Would you believe I am talking about HDR photography (both capture and processing)? Well, I am. I’m talking about saving a photograph from relative obscurity. Sure, many of us can shoot an image of a scene and call it a day. But the work is not done until you have “saved” or “rescued” that image from being boring. And how do we do that? First, you start with a vision: what do you “see” and what it is you want your intended audience to “see”. You the frame (or compose, if you prefer) your shot in such a way that the elements you “feel” are most important are included in the shot and are “placed” in such a way that they will grab the viewer’s eye. Then, you shoot your brackets (I usually prefer 9 exposures, each 1EV apart from the other to cover a wide dynamic range and to keep noise levels at a minimum). Next, you run those shots through your HDR software of choice, and tone-map. Now comes the fun part, ’cause you’re not done! You take what the HDR software gives you and you pull it into Photoshop to make the image what it was you “saw” when you were first captured by the scene. BTW, listening to some cool tunes to put you in the mood helps, a lot, at least it does me. For this particular image, I listened to the aforementioned ‘Man in the Box’ while running the brackets through my HDR software of choice, but I switched to Bassnectar’s Timestretch to finish it off and to write this blog post. Once I was done with Photoshop, you should end up with an image that ROCKS your world! And, if it rocks for you, it will probably rock for at least one other person out there! Thanks, mom, for digging my work!
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