Jupiter Artland

All summer I waited for nice weather on one of my days off to go and see this place, and finally, in September, I got my wish.   I went off to Jupiter Artland (http://www.jupiterartland.org/) with my camera, naturally!   It's a plot of land with a collection of odd outdoor sculptures.   It's like nothing I've ever seen before.   The biggest and most famous one, Life Mounds, made me feel like I was in Super Mario Land.

This photoshoot was also my first attempt at HDR (high dynamic range) photography.  The way it works is that you take 3 shots of the same thing, but bracket the exposures so that you get one "normal" shot, one overexposed one and one underexposed one.   You then combine the three shots using clever software (Photomatix, in my case).   This lets you capture as much detail as possible.  Quite often with landscape photos you will expose the land perfectly, but find that you've lost all the drama in the sky.   The underexposed photo will capture the detail in the sky and let you put it back into your photo.   You can also make photos look very weird and cool!    Like so:

                                                                  Normal photo

                                                                   Overexposed

                                                                Underexposed

                                                                      HDR!


I was really surprised at how easy the software is to use, and how easy it is to get the photo looking good without too much time spent mucking about with it.  I also discovered that the technique is not nearly as forgiving as I would have liked.   If your "normal" photo isn't correctly exposed there's not really any way to rescue that in the HDR.   Bother.   I also discovered that there are many many different ways to edit an HDR photo and completely change its look.   You can create something very surreal and very obviously HDR, or you can use the technique very subtly so that you can hardly tell the photo is an HDR at all. 

I really enjoyed this shoot, and learning this new technique was really good fun.   Jupiter Artland was well worth the money (though sneaking in without paying would be the easiest thing in the world) and a really interesting place to photograph.   HDR is also definitely something I'll be trying again and hopefully I'll get better at it.  :)  Here are a few of favorite HDR pics from the day:

                                                                         Very HDR

                                                        Much more subtle HDR

And a couple of non HDR photos from the day: