An evening of two halves, the first was me talking about High Dynamic Range Imaging and the second was Roy presenting the practicalities of wedding photography.
HDRI
I started with a presentation of the whys and wherefores of HDRI. I followed that with demonstrating how to take a set of exposures and use Photomatix to tone map them in order to create a printable image.
I recommended two books:
- The HDRI Handbook by Christian Bloch.
This is an excellent book, it starts by explaining what HDRI is and follows that with a run down of all of the HDRI programs which were available at the time of writing. The book covers tone mapping, how to shoot HDRI panoramas and the application of HDRI in cinematic CGI effects. - Practical HDRI by Jack Howard.
Whereas The HDRI Handbook is high on theory this book is all about creating tonemapped HDRI images. It is packed with handy tips on how to get great results.
If you like the idea of doing this and are going to buy one of the HDRI packages (e.g., photomatix or Essential HDR) you should buy The HDRI Handbook and visit the HDR Labs HDRI software page where you can get substantial (up to 30%) discount on much of the available HDRI software. That way the book pays for itself.
An interesting non-HDRI approach to combining exposures is Enfuse, which is a free program. It is a command line program which makes it tricky to use. There is a plugin for Photoshop Lightroom which drives Enfuse and makes it very simple to use. If you don't have Lightroom you could try Enfuse GUI, I haven't tried it myself.
I talked about how are eyes respond to light in a logarithmic fashion, whereas digital capture is linear and has a gamma curve applied, and that HDRI files store image data linearly. I suspect that I lost a few people at that point! However, there is a an article entitled "Raw Capture, Linear Gamma, and Exposure" at the Adobe site which explains it all far better than I did.
For what they are worth you can download my presentation slides.
Wedding Photography
Roy described the joys and pitfalls of wedding photograph, illustrating it with some of his wedding photography. He showed us a variety of issues he has come up against, and described how weddings from different cultures present their own challenges. An example being a Chinese wedding where the bride will wear six different dresses during the day, each of which has to be photographed. It also became clear that there isn't a lot of money to be made from weddings, it is hard work and takes up several days of the photographers time in preparation, the wedding day, and then processing and distributing images and albums.