Dawid Loubser
Member
Hi,
The local Mercedes-Benz club has an exhibition of 2-door Mercedes cars over the years, and there were a couple of beautiful 300SL roadsters, and a very accurate 300SLR recreation, on show. Having extensively photographed the 300SL and gullwings in past occasions, I turned my attention to the SLR, a raw but beautifully formed car so stereotypical of the 'cartoonish' fast racing cars.
The event was particularly challening, because this was at midday in the incredibly harsh South African sun, which means the tonal range of any image is almost always far beyond any single capture. It's always a matter of deciding what information you want to throw away, and for what detail should you expose. RAW image capture, together with processing the highlights and shadows, means film could never touch the results I get from my 1D MkIIN in this light:
(Click to view larger versions)
Later in the day, the range was simply too overwhelmingly high, so I turned to HDR to capture + Mantiuk tone mapping to produce images which show detail from the brightest reflection to the tyre treads of the cars, all in the worst lighting imaginable (I actually had a headache from sun exposure). HDR, with not-over-the-top processing, can produce a calm and rich representation of such an extreme scene - but damn, it eats CPU! (the tone-mapping).
This was just a little experiment, I made this HDR without looking through the viewfinder - "shooting from the foot" so to speak, so unfortunately there is a strong lens flare:
Technical: All shot with the EF 16-35mm f/2.8L and EF 50mm f/1.2L. RAW developed with Apple Aperture, HDR done with qtpfsgui with mantiuk tone mapping. Each from 3 captures (-3ev,0,+3ev : never seen the need to start off with more images)
The local Mercedes-Benz club has an exhibition of 2-door Mercedes cars over the years, and there were a couple of beautiful 300SL roadsters, and a very accurate 300SLR recreation, on show. Having extensively photographed the 300SL and gullwings in past occasions, I turned my attention to the SLR, a raw but beautifully formed car so stereotypical of the 'cartoonish' fast racing cars.
The event was particularly challening, because this was at midday in the incredibly harsh South African sun, which means the tonal range of any image is almost always far beyond any single capture. It's always a matter of deciding what information you want to throw away, and for what detail should you expose. RAW image capture, together with processing the highlights and shadows, means film could never touch the results I get from my 1D MkIIN in this light:
(Click to view larger versions)
Later in the day, the range was simply too overwhelmingly high, so I turned to HDR to capture + Mantiuk tone mapping to produce images which show detail from the brightest reflection to the tyre treads of the cars, all in the worst lighting imaginable (I actually had a headache from sun exposure). HDR, with not-over-the-top processing, can produce a calm and rich representation of such an extreme scene - but damn, it eats CPU! (the tone-mapping).
This was just a little experiment, I made this HDR without looking through the viewfinder - "shooting from the foot" so to speak, so unfortunately there is a strong lens flare:
Technical: All shot with the EF 16-35mm f/2.8L and EF 50mm f/1.2L. RAW developed with Apple Aperture, HDR done with qtpfsgui with mantiuk tone mapping. Each from 3 captures (-3ev,0,+3ev : never seen the need to start off with more images)