I want to share some photos with you all. Three to be exact, all of which I took during this winter. I hope they will demonstrate that using the HDR-technique can be useful even when faced with gray landscapes.

Those familiar with my photographs have probably heard me say that I take HDR-photographs. I will not go into detail about that now, perhaps in a later post, but you can always find lots of information on the internet. Secondpicture (short) These photos are not different, and the HDR technique has been used. The benefits of HDR are not as obvious in winter scenes, because there is little color to work with, but you can still get the details that otherwise would be lost.

I am not a big fan of winter photography, mostly because of the lack of overall color. I like to really take advantage of the colors, and create something spectacular with it in post-proccessing. So when everythings becomes white I tend to go a different direction. Instead of vivid colors I try to twist the black and white effect to the extreme, and create something that looks very cold and perhaps a little old. This first photo illustrates this quite nicely. It is taken from a low mountain at home, and we look down towards Larsnes (Møre og Romsdal). By turning up the contrast, and tuning the levels toward a more clear white color, this photo becomes interesting. To avoid the greyness that snow usually has I increased the exposure time, and the ISO-rating. 1/200 sec, ISO800, 23.0 mm, f/8.0 I think this was necessary, but the far-away mountains got a little over-exposed because of it. All in all I'm quite pleased with this photo, though the motive is not really that interesting. One way to make it more interesting could be to remove some of the sky, but I liked the composition.

This second photo is from Trondheim. During the freezing cold me and my girlfriend went on a photoshoot. It was very quiet, and the snow stuck to almost everything, such as leaves and rock. We walked to Festningen, and old fortress with a view of the city. This building is located inside the fortress walls, and in my DeviantArt gallery I have a nice photo of it during a warm summer day. The main building of the fortress blocked some of the sun, and created a nice bright effect on half the building and the beautiful tree. I darkened the sky a little for effect, and also applied the same contrast technique to make it look a little old.

This last photo is also from Festninga, and we see out through one of the old doors, down toward the city sentrum. Through the trees we see Nidarosdomen, which is the motive for this photo. However, the composition needed the frame of the doorway, and the effect of frost on the bricks was just to cool to pass by. Actually, since I knew that Nidarosdomen would not be very interesting in this light, the frozen gate is the main attraction for this photo. A lot of sharpening and levels to get the look I wanted from the brick. I think the result looks good.

I will try to write something about the HDR-technique, and perhaps about how-to make them in windows and ubuntu. There are many ways to Rome.