Warwick Thumb 5 in HDRI and Merry Christmas!

bassplayer22

bassplayer22

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So I got a little bored during my Christmas break from work and decided to snap a few photo's of my Wick in HDRI. HDRI is pretty sweet if you haven't messed with it yet. I'm no photographer, but I enjoy taking pics like this and making them look cool. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all!

Tim
 
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... and my sub $200.00 SX Jazz bass that I picked up a few weeks back that sounds amazing. I haven't played a 4 string in about 10 years, but this was definately a good purchase.

Tim
 
Mate they are both backwards!!! Is that what HDRI does??? Only kidding. Great basses. Love the grain on the SX.

Cheers & Merry Xmas

Rusty
 
These HDR photos always remind me of computer games graphics. Something about them that is slightly 'artificial'. In this case, the wall texture reminds me of bump mapping techniques :) Sometimes it's the shine and polish that reminds of phong shading. Noneless, great pictures.
 
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HDRI is pretty cool, but the picture has to be the right one. I've found that natural lighting pics turn out the best. I'm no photographer or anywhere close to being good at it, but the program I used really brings it out.

Here's one of Heidelberg Castle in Germany that I took this past summer.





Some others from Germany...
 
I don't want to be a buzz-kill, but those are not High Dynamic Range images. The key for an HDRI image is that there is detail in the shadows as well in the highlights which you cannot see in a normal picture, by (in the simplest form) merging an overexposed photo (which has a lot of shadow detail) with an underexposed one (which has a lot of highlight detail). If you look closely at the shadows on the mortars and the castle, you see you actually lose detail in those places.

Which of course does not mean they are not pretty images, the effect however is not HDRI, but more of a 'high contrast, high saturation' type.

This is a good example of an HDR image, as anyone who has ever photographed a church window can tell you it has impossible amounts of detail in shadows (the walls) and highlights (the windows):
Old_saint_pauls_1.jpg


[Lecture-mode off]

Actually, we use a limited form of HDR imaging at Warwick for the instrument pictures where we have radically different woods (say ebony and maple as extremes) in one instrument. We take the underexposed (darker) version of the instrument and use the maple from that and splice in the ebony from an overexposed version of the image. This results in (again) more visible detail, wood-grain and bass-porn-factor :)

Thinking about this, I think I'll make a post in the nearish future detailing how we photograph our instruments, might be interesting?
 
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Matthijs said:
I don't want to be a buzz-kill, but those are not High Dynamic Range images.
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Not buzz-kill at all, but this is your opinion. I never once said I was a photographer, unlike you, but to say that I haven't done exactly what you just said is false. The picture you have shown is no different, in terms of interpretation, than mine is. The great thing about HDRI is that you can make them look as real, or fake as you like and it is all a matter of interpretation. I have seen some amazing HDR image that look real and some that look fake.

All I did was take 3 pictures with auto-bracketing -2, 0, +2, on the exposure, throw them into Photomatix and play around with the settings.

From the WIKI page:

"In image processing, computer graphics, and photography, high dynamic range imaging (HDRI or just HDR) is a set of techniques that allow a greater dynamic range of luminances between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than standard digital imaging techniques or photographic methods. This wider dynamic range allows HDR images to more accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes, ranging from direct sunlight to faint starlight.[1]

The two main sources of HDR imagery are computer renderings and merging of multiple photographs, which in turn are known as low dynamic range (LDR)[2] or standard dynamic range (SDR)[3] images. Tone mapping techniques, which reduce overall contrast to facilitate display of HDR images on devices with lower dynamic range, can be applied to produce images with preserved or exaggerated local contrast for artistic effect."

I never claimed to be a professional, only a novice having some fun. This is my definition of what an HDR image should represent in terms of look and feel. The image you posted (like mine) is nothing more than interpretation.

set01hdri5from__dsc3596.jpg
 
Here is the original pic of the Warwick.





And the optimized photo after Photomatix.




I think I did a pretty good job of doing exactly what you posted. "The key for an HDRI image is that there is detail in the shadows as well in the highlights which you cannot see in a normal picture, by (in the simplest form) merging an overexposed photo (which has a lot of shadow detail) with an underexposed one (which has a lot of highlight detail)."
 
Yup, agreed on the bass shot :) I was looking more at the landscape shots and got in a little lost in those. Apologies :)
 
Matthijs said:
Yup, agreed on the bass shot :) I was looking more at the landscape shots and got in a little lost in those. Apologies :)
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No need to apologize, I didn't take it that way. I was trying to bring the colors out in the landscape photos. They were good enogh for me... I don't have all the fancy photo supplies like real photographers do. I'm just a hack...

Tim
 
Wow, I know what my next purchase will be! Thank you both for posting info about this technology. I will do some research on my own as well but at least I know who to ask when it's time to purchase.;)
 
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