Jumping wind surfer

Susanne

Empty 2-top

At the Top of the Mark. A single beam of evening sun hits the chairs, like a spotlight, drawn to the abandoned seats.

Golden Gate Bridge in sunset

Golden Gate Bridge in sunset

Marin headlands in the sunset

Electronic bakteriofage

Melancholy

is a halfpacked home, still needing condensation into mobile units, perfect for losing both your most beloved and your most hated possessions.

Self portrait blinded by flash

As seen in the membrane of our loudspeakers.

As time goes by

Woofer

Golden Gate Bridge in the creeping fog

Misty bridge

Colourful façades

Houses toppling

Jump!

Taiko-dojo SF plays their composition “Tsunami 2” at the Cherry Blossom festival.

Taiko

Taiko-dojo SF plays their composition “Tsunami 2”.

Noisebridge mannequin

As we approach Noisebridge, we are greeted by a vision in red.

Dungeon of Learning

In the Stanford University Green library, you venture into the magazines yourself to retrieve the literature needed: sometimes this takes you into deep and mysterious dungeons.

Mushroom on the chessboard

Not quite the same kind of move as the Squid on the Chessboard, but still one not entirely expected.

The odd one out

Billowing shroom

Ablaze!

[CA Roadtrip] Opulent swimming pool

[CA Roadtrip] Swimming in gold and azure

[CA Roadtrip] Shooting ball

Oberwolfach has a Carom table, with the legend connecting it to mathematicians being interested in ergodic theory.

Hearst Castle doesn't care about the mathematics, and thus has both a Carom table and a Billiards table.

[CA Roadtrip] Enough with Big Sur already!

Instead, have the gorgeous sunset light we caught the Golden Gate Bridge in!

[CA Roadtrip] A sky on fire

[CA Roadtrip] A sliver of blue

[CA Roadtrip] The problem with HDR…

…is sometimes I just can get it to look just right. Here's what'd be a gorgeous use case for the technique: a sunset. Shot into the sun that just barely hides behind a cloud. In front of us, red plants on the ground. A -2.0/0.0/+2.0 exposure bracket certainly gets us everything we need in terms of pixels.

But a straight up and down HDR can't quite distinguish between the darkness of the plants, and the darkness of the darker bits of sky, so we can't quite get the balance right. Gradiented filters just look awkward. So it is in with the mask we go!

A first attempt, I mask with exposure modification while still in Photoshop with 32 bit, before I even flatten the image down from the full on HDR master:

but it doesn't really look good. Possibly because of me being still too clumsy with the masking brush, possibly some other reason, but it doesn't come out quite the way I had hoped.

Second attempt, just layer the +2 and the -2 exposures, and mask in the flowers from the lighter onto the sky and ocean of the darker one.

If anything, I'd feel this looks worse. But then, I'm not sure. Maybe this could've been saved with better brushing in Photoshop. Maybe you all really like this and I'm just being my usual obnoxiously perfectionist self.

I honestly don't know.