For our last assignment I experimented with HDR photography. I used my CHDK-hacked Canon camera to take the photos and Luminance HDR to create the HDR photos and perform the tone mapping from HDR to regular LDR photos.

I did quite a bit of experimenting with my camera and the software to understand how all of this works. I also read all of the Luminance HDR documentation. The documentation clarified a lot of details about HDR photography and helped me understand all of the steps to making photos like this.

All of the below HDR photos were created with 8 photos with exposure settings ranging from -3 to +4. The HDR photos were created using the Debevec model with a Gaussian weighting function and a Gamma response curve. I used Mantiuk '08 to tonemap the HDR images to the LDR JPG image format. There were other possible choices for these settings and although I did experiment with them I don't claim to have a full understanding of what they are or what they do. I used these settings because I was happiest with the results. I will have to look for other online resources provided by professional photographers to get better guidance and intuition about how to use these tools.

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Recently I bought a small tripod for my camera. In class we learned about the importance of camera stability to achieve maximum resolution. Happily small inexpensive tripods are available on amazon.com.

While using the camera mounted on my new tripod I noticed that the camera would move a bit as I pressed and released the shutter button. To manage this issue and achieve maximum stability I added a 2 second timer so I could push the shutter and give the camera a moment to recover from the force of my hand.

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Building on last week's assignment, this week I took several photos with proper white balance and exposure. To accomplish this I installed the Canon Hack Development Kit (CHDK) on my ancient Canon PowerShot SD1300 IS camera. What a difference it makes! Years of crappy photos could have been avoided if I had known about CHDK.

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Our first assignment is to explore the camera's ability to properly set the white balance.

The camera I'm using is an old Canon PowerShot SD1300 IS 12.1 MP Digital Camera. I've had this camera for years but I stopped using it for the most part when I got a phone that could take decent pictures. I used it for this assignment because Eric Rosenthal got me to believe that I could take great pictures with this if I learned how to properly take control of the camera.

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