Christmas 2009

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I was in San Jose for the last 10 days for some meetings and to attend SPIE. While I was there, I went for a short hike through the redwoods in Big Basin State Park. It was fantastic–if you’ve ever been to Muir Woods National Monument north of San Francisco, it’s very similar only with far fewer people. I saw almost no one on the trail, which seemed unusual for a Saturday (although I did start at 7am).

I took a few pictures and put them in a gallery as usual.

As promised, I’ve put my pictures from our trip to the Burlington, Vermont area last July in a gallery. The main reason for our trip was to attend the wedding of Richard McCormick and Cielo Mendoza, but we also found time to visit the Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream factory near Waterbury and I did some hiking as well.

In July we went to a wedding in Burlington, Vermont. I was sorting through our pictures recently (I’ll put them in a gallery soon) and came upon some shots I took on a hike along the Nordic skiing trails at Bolton Valley. One of the sights along the way was labeled on the map as Olga’s Falls, which is apparently somewhat impressive at times but was mostly a trickle on my visit. Still, I had walked a long way and fought my way through some thick undergrowth to reach the falls, so I felt obligated to come away with a nice photo at least. Below is the image I got with the compact point-and-shoot camera I had with me at the time:

Not very interesting, right? It proves that I was there at least, but there are several places where the photo is either washed out from overexposure or too dark from underexposure. This is a common problem with photography in a forest on a sunny day—it’s too bright in the sun and too dark in the shade for most cameras to capture detail in both areas. Your eye has the ability to perceive a much wider range of brightness, so pictures of high contrast scenes like this one often turn out disappointing.

One way to get around this it to capture several images of the same scene with different exposures and combine them into a high dynamic range (HDR) image. So I used the exposure bracketing on my camera to take several pictures in rapid succession with a range of shutter speeds to vary the amount of light captured by the image sensor:

I then used some software to combine these images into a single HDR image. However, there’s still a problem: conventional computer monitors (or printers) can’t display the full information in an HDR image, so we still have to map the information in the HDR into an image that can be displayed. This process is known as tone mapping. Here’s the result:

This is closer to what I remember, although it could still use some tweaking (the vegetation was lush and green, but I’m not sure it was that green!) and it’s not exactly a prize-winning composition. You can find some very striking example of HDR and tone-mapping on Flickr.com, some realistic and some less so.