Wednesday 15 September 2010

HDR Workshop with Trey Ratcliff

I spent all day Saturday and Sunday with the legendary Trey Ratcliff learning about HDR photography. He is by far the best exponent of this type of photography that I have seen, so it was a unique opportunity as spaces on the course were limited to 20.

We were based in a lovely building in  Goodenough College, off Grays Inn Road and saw many examples of Trey's work. He worked on some images in real time and talked us through his thought processess as he worked.

On Saturday we took pictures in the courtyard of the college and worked on them on our laptops while Trey came around helping us individually. On Sunday we went to the British Museum for our images which again Trey helped us with individually.

He also gave us a truckload of stuff to take away - the premium version of his Austin, Texas HDR worshop on 4 DVDs and a USB stick with several sample images and tutorials.

What have I learned?
I have dabbled in HDR photography on and off for the last two years, and although I have books by Trey and others on the subject, none of them really tell you how to use Photomatix Pro. HDR photography seems to be fairly subjective so there is no definitive way to process images.

The most important thing I've learned is that Photomatix is only part of the process, and images will not be perfect at that stage. I have a better understanding of the work that needs to be done in Photoshop - particularly when it comes to correcting ghosting.

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