Shooting in Greece

I mean shooting pictures! In this trip, I took photos with my new Canon 400D, and made full use of the lenses. I also shot some images for HDR compositions, and here are some of the cool results.

Just in case you don't know, HDR means high dynamic range, and it is a technique of combining several images of different exposures to form one image who contains more visible information. Your eyes together with your brain are actually wonderful cameras which can adjust images you see so well that you can see both bright and faded parts of a scene. The result is a picture of perfect scene with different parts leveled evenly in terms of contrast and lighting.

Your camera, though, isn't that cool. For example, I want to shoot this sunset. I either get this dark to see the sun in perfect lighting...

Or I have to increase exposure to get the houses...

Both of them are not good images. With HDR merging, you will get this, which looks very much like what your human eyes see:

I also got this street shot in the evening in Athens. With HDR merging, I got a pretty nice result.

Isn't that nice? I used Photoshop for the above street shot, while I like using Photomatix too, which I used for the above sunset shot. If I use Photomatix for the street shot, something more creative can come out, with stronger contrast and saturation.

Hope that interests you all!