Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Mausoleum in HDR

Through my photography club I was able to get into a mausoleum that is usually closed to the public. This was somewhat of a good will deal, we provide them with images for their use (a very good deal for them) and the local club consortium gets access for an upcoming field trip.

This is an old mausoleum that has been in Portland quite a while and has sections built over decades. We had only 4 hours to shoot and this was a big place (8 floors with multiple long corridors per level). The lighting was often high contrast, almost non-existent and/or with mixed sources - incadescent, flourescent and daylight. Good candidate for HDR photography.
The HDR shots required from 4-9 shots taken 1-stop apart to capture the total light intensity span. I think 9 may not have been quite enough in some cases. In a couple cases where it was real dark I had to up the ISO to 800 to shoot a sequence in a reasonable amount of time. I had to use the built in camera noise reduction which made shot times even longer.

A first pass at post processing of these images can be seen here. I can play with many of these images for a quite a while to get different results.

I have include a couple HDR images here in the blog. The final image is not HDR, but just a simple pleasant image.