How To: HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography

http://www.digital-photography-school.com/how-to-hdr-photography?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DigitalPhotographySchool+%28Digital+Photography+School%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

by Darren Rowse

HDR Photography has been around since the days of film, but has become extremely popular in recent years. High Dynamic Range, or HDR, is essentially a way of processing photos that allows for a wider and deeper range of colors. This type of processing makes an image appear much closer to what the human eye sees as opposed to what your camera's sensor allows. In example, the photograph above shows the natural rich colors of the building as well as the natural rich colors of the sky. Without HDR, the sky could either be well exposed and the building silhouetted, or the building well exposed and the sky blown out. Creating an HDR photo however will allows both elements to appear natural and rich in color.

One method of making an HDR photograph is to combine multiple images with different exposures together. This tutorial will explain how this photo was created and in using the same process, how you can create your own HDR photos.

Step 1. Bracketing Your Subject

Bracketing is done when several shots of the same subject are taken with varying exposures. This can be used for almost any occasion or type of photography and is a good way to ensure that you've gotten the shot you wanted when you sit down to edit. For example, you will set your camera on a tripod and take one shot at 1/200 another at 1/400 and another at 1/80. Now you have 3 different shots of the same image, but each shot will have a different exposure. Each setting and subject will vary obviously when it comes to bracketing, but many cameras have a built in bracketing feature that will do the work for you.

For this photo there are only two key elements, the building and the sky. So the first shot that will be taken will be to get a proper exposure of the sky:

As was mentioned above, the sky is well exposed but the building is silhouetted. This was taken with a faster exposure to ensure the colors of the sky would be rich and deep as opposed to blown out.

Now the second shot will be taken to get a proper exposure of the building:

The building is well exposed in this shot, but again, the sky is blown out. This was taken at a slower shutter speed in order to reduce the silhouette effect the bright sky gives.

Now that we have our two images, we will combine them to get the best of both.

Step 2. Combing the Photos

Photoshop is a great tool to use in HDR photography because it is fairly easy to combine photos. So let's bring both images into Photoshop.

The photo with the correct exposure for the building (left) will be moved on top of the photo with the correct exposure for the sky (right).

Now that the photos are layered on top of each other we will combine the two. Our top layer has a well-exposed building and a blown out sky, so let's remove the sky of this image. In order to remove the sky we will first select the top layer, and then choose the magnetic lasso tool. With the magnetic lasso tool we will select the entire sky. This is where an ok HDR photo can turn into an awesome HDR photo. The more time you put into being exact and making sure that you don't miss any pieces, the better and more natural your photo will look.

Then we simply hit the delete key and viola! Our well exposed sky replaces the blown out sky.

The photo is then put into Lightroom and edited a bit more…

HDR photography can have some amazing results if done correctly. The key is to not go to the extreme and combine dozens of photos leaving every pixel of the photo well exposed. Leave room for natural shadows and use moderation when combining images.

Nicholas Moeggenberg is a photographer from Cincinnati, OH and runs the photography contest – May the Best Photo Win.

Read more: http://www.digital-photography-school.com/how-to-hdr-photography#ixzz1WLob1Oej

Disney Inks Deal with Greenbox, Chinese eCommerce Is Taking Off

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/disney-inks-deal-with-greenbox-chinese-ecommerce-is-taking-off/2011/08/29/gIQAMffpmJ_story.html

 - The Washington Post

By TechCrunch.com, Monday, August 29, 3:37 AM

A lot of Americans desperately want to believe that China is full of poor people who can't innovate, and the only goods they make are cheap, toxic rip-offs our Western brands. They want to believe the only reason the Chinese economy is surging is because the West wants cheap goods and China knows how to make them that way.
These people will hate this post because it's about a company called Greenbox that flies in the face of those preconceived notions.
Greenbox makes high-end, super-styled kids clothes in and for the Chinese market. It caught the eye of Disney, which reached out to the company to ask if it wanted to manufacture some of their lines. "No thanks," the company replied. "We're not interested in just being an OEM."
Wait, isn't this China we're talking about? It's a country of OEMs.
The mouse house came back with a sweeter offer that's being announced at a ceremony in China tonight: It has licensed the rights for the princess collection, Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse and Winnie the Pooh to Greenbox. The company will design a high-end online collection to be sold online in China, as part of a broad plan to help build hype for the upcoming themepark in Shanghai.
Greenbox was founded more than ten years ago by a designer named Fangfang Wu who started to make clothes for her kids because she was so unhappy with the cheap, boring ones being sold in the country at the time. She obsessed over fabrics, fashion and design and a hobby quickly turned into a business, as she opened a chain of stores, and later closed those stores to sell on Taobao for better margins.
She was one of the top grossing sellers on Taobao as her designs struck a chord as with other young, working women in China who wanted to flaunt their increasingly hip and unique tastes. (I mean, look at that outfit above. It's like a little Chinese Natalie Wood playing Red Riding Hood. How is that not adorable?) In 2010, DCM's China office sought her out, investing just over $10 million to help scale the business.
Today Greenbox is bringing in about $50 million in annual revenues on decent margins. She charges between $30-$40 for items— not absurd, but certainly on the higher end for kids' clothes. "It's a classic case for venture capital: High gross margins, but takes money to build it to scale," says Hurst Lin of DCM.
Note I didn't describe Greenbox as the fill-in-the-blank of China. In fact, I'm hard-pressed to come up with an ecommerce model she's ripping off from the US. Kids clothes hasn't been a natural vertical for etailers here, save being an offshoot of a site like Amazon.
The reason Greenbox has worked so well for China is cultural. Because there are so many only children, there are at least six people wanting to lavish them with cute things: The parents, and two sets of grandparents. This was the same insight Tencent tapped into to monetize its virtual goods early on.
So, Greenbox: Not a copy cat, and not the invisible cheap assembly partner for the West either. Welcome to the next stage of Chinese entrepreneurship.
Greenbox is part of a crop of booming ecommerce companies in China. For years, the market has been held back due to the typical challenges of shipping, infrastructure and payment platforms. Jack Ma, of Alibaba, has long said ecommerce would be bigger in China than here, and that's not just because there are more people. In the US, he calls ecommerce "dessert," but in China there are so many people underserved by brick-and-mortar retail that ecommerce will be the "main course."
DCM and other firms have been aggressive backing many new ecommerce players, and they aren't as simple as just being the Amazon of China. (Although, to be fair, DCM backed one of those too.) Many of these companies, like Greenbox, show a sophistication in appealing to what the Chinese market wants, not simply what's worked elsewhere.
A surprising vertical Lin seized upon that has never proved lucrative in the US is wine. As incomes soar, many Chinese are developing a taste for Western wine, but have trouble finding interesting vintages and even navigating the language barriers, he says. His bet, YesMyWine, isn't just an ecommerce play, it's a content and media play.
He was delighted the PR contact on the call brought up another hot DCM ecommerce company: La Miu, which makes sexy lingerie. I could hear him squirming as he tried to explain– delicately– why Victoria's Secret failed miserably in China, while more recently La Miu has succeeded.
Victoria's Secret tried to market to women in their 30s who wanted to be comfortable not sexy. It was a bit too early in China's consumer revolution and husbands weren't demanding sexier underwear so ever-practical Chinese women just didn't see the appeal.
Victoria's Secret made another mistake that Lin tries to explain as tactfully as possible: Asian women have… different bodies….than Western women.
But La Miu has taken a totally different tact: Marketing underwear designed for the Asian body type to teens. "Born in the late 1990s they are much more a global consumer, they are open-minded and more rebellious," Lin says. "It's been a huge success."
As I've written before, China's ability to be the assembly line to the world wasn't where its role in the global economy ended; it was where it began. An ability to make products cheaper than anywhere else gave way to an ability to make high end products more nimbly than anywhere else. And increasingly, entrepreneurs like Wu are adding design and brand on top of that to create products the broader world will want.
The first generation of Chinese entrepreneurs was about picking the low-hanging fruit in a massive country just opening up to capitalism. Now the real fun is starting.
(Shameless plug: Join TechCrunch at Disrupt Beijing in October to learn more.)