Day 27. January 30th 2011

My little Mac is back from the apple store and all shiny and fixed, they even cleaned it for me! Some people think that paying for an extended warranty is a waste of money. My £100 apple care warranty on my laptop has already paid for about £400 worth of repares! So, along with the piece of mind this gives me, I think it's money well spent.

Finally had the time to snap a picture on my way to work! Yay. Didn't have time whist at work to cheekily edit it though, hence another late update. Be warned for those of you reading you may need your maths brain switched on for this!

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. When you take an image the camera sensor can capture more information than can be displayed. So, for example, if a JPEG image can display brightness from 1 (dark) all the way to 10 (bright) , your digital camera may be able to capture from 0 to 11. That is why it's possible to brighten or darken an image in a program like photoshop.

When you shoot in RAW which on most dSLR's is the really BIG file size. They are massive files for a reason, using my made up scale of light to dark, a RAW image captures -2 to 13 this gives you much more information which you can play around with in terms of brightening/darkening an image.

Here is the original image.

Now with HDR you basically take the dark parts and make them lighter and the light parts and make them darker revealing more detail which would normally be thrown away. This can be done subtly which gives you a more natural looking image. But this next image is what happens if you take this idea to extreems, because I rarely do subtle.

And there you have todays HDR photo of the day. I love the eerily dream like qualities you can get with this process making an average looking street in north London look spectacular.

See you all tomorrow for more photo madness.

Gordon