~2003 Harley-Davidson~

~100th Anniversary Ultra Classic~

Photographed my friends Harley this afternoon, and let me tell you, it was hot shooting this bike in the full sun. Temperatures were in the low 100's, and this shoot lasted about an hour. I was soak and exhausted by the time I had finish.

And to add to the pressure of the whole experience, this was my first try at doing HDR. No, I don't mean Harley Davidson Repair! I'm referring to High Dynamic Range photography. Actually a pretty amazing process, three shots, one at normal exposure, one at 2 stops over-exposed and one shot at 2 stops under-exposed. After the shoot you load the 3 shots into the software, Nik's HDR Efex Pro, turn on the "blender" and abracadabra an image comes out the other end! An image where you can see everything in the highlights and darks. That's something a normal one shot exposure cannot do! If I had just taken one correctly exposed image, the background would have been blown out white and the blacks would have been, well, solid black. Isn't technology wonderful?

Now, we all know I'm a big post-processing photographer guy. That being said, I'm not sure I will be doing much of this HDR work. I can't explain why, it just is not my thing. Maybe it's because a tripod must be used along with a shutter release cable and the camera has to be preset to take those three, or more, shots at different exposures. I'm starting to feel constrained already. For all my camera work, I move and refocus, compose and format, change perspective and stalk my subject, fiddle with shutter speeds and f-stops . Maybe you can see why this style of shooting bothers me. Maybe in the future or when the need arises I'll take out the tripod, take my three shots and load them into this program, but for now I'll stick with my normal mumbo jumbo!

Thanks for reading and looking, TucsonJim ;o)

PS: You know what? It very well could have been the heat that spoiled the experience, who knows? Maybe the wintertime would be more conducive to this type of activity.


Big Harley