Top of the World

I had these bracketed photos from a top the Empire State Building for almost nine months now with the intention of creating HDR images. For those who aren't familiar, HDR stands for an imaging process called High-dynamic-range. Three images of varying exposures (+2 0 -2) are merged together and tone mapped to produce increased luminosity between the lightest and darkest areas of an image. In other words, you get greater tonal detail then you would out of a single image.

I used a program called Photomatix to create these images and Adobe Lightroom to clean them up. To give you an idea of the real difference HDR creates, I included a before image for comparison. I'm not super thrilled about the results but it can likely be due to having crappy originals to work with. I guess they're still kinda cool but have a look and tell me what you think.


West, facing the Hudson
Before

After

South, facing Downtown/SOHO/LES/Chelsea/etc
Before

After

I suppose practice makes perfect. Expect me to play around with this technique a bit more in the near future.


stv