My old passion of photography has taken a new twist. And I am having a ton of fun with it. The type of photography is called "High Dynamic Range."

What is so special about it? Have you ever taken a picture of a mountain landscape with a lot of sky in it only to find the mountain and landscape are almost black and the sky is bright and washed out? Maybe that is where the phrase "guess you had to be there" comes from because the picture certainly does not do justice to what you saw at the time.

Enter HDR photography. This process allows you to capture both the lights and the darks, which is what you wanted in the first place. But nothing tells the story like a picture. Check out the "before" and "after" pictures here.

About the images

The first thing I hear from folks that see the HDR image is  "That looks like a painting." Then the next thing I hear is "The first one looks like my pictures."

The first one is a typical snap shot. The camera cannot make sense of the big difference between very light and very dark. But the second image is three pictures combined (under, over, and regular exposure).

I combine them using a couple of software programs and spend a fair amount of time on the computer making changes "to taste" (much like a cook does). The result is an artistic expression of the scene as I saw it.