Photo TR: Disneyland in HDR

[sgtfox]

My wife threw a surprise party for my for my 30th birthday last weekend, with the culmination of the party being a surprise trip to Disneyland, THAT DAY!!!

Crowds were light for a holiday weekend, the weather was perfect, and despite all my doubts, Midway Mania was actually really, really fun!

I took a whole bunch of photos, including a lot of HDR (High Dynamic Range) photos. I hope you enjoy them! There are a lot of photos, and they're pretty large files so I picked out and put most of my favorites in my trip report for you. In order to prevent bogging you down on the forum, the rest are on my blog at www.arizonasteve.com



Welcome to Disneyland!



Main Street USA



The Hub



Partners



Castle... So... SMALL



No Matterhorn Line!



We Must Ride!



Mark Twain



Best Ride EVAR



No Line Here Either!



We Got SOAKED On Splash For Some Reason



Heh. They're Still Defacing It Eight Years Later...



GRRizzly Rapids



You Can Almost FEEL The Mist



Sunset At The Pier



Panorama Of The Pier At Night



Panorama Of The Pier With The Sun Setting



Tower of Terror at Night



Go Star Trader! Still Kickin'



Space Is Soooo Nice With the Redone Track

[Datameister]

Thanks for posting! I'm loving the saturation of the colors and increased dynamic range is almost always a good thing--not to mention the fabulous compositions!--but you wanna be careful with the halos where the sky meets the darker foreground objects. They're showing up in nearly every shot involving blue sky, and they do ruin it a bit for me. The first shot and the first shot of the Matterhorn are probably the worst offenders. It's tough to get it right, but it's truly worth it. Anyway, keep up the great work!

[princedalton]

omg! AMAZING photos!! Some of the best photos I've ever seen!! I LOOOVE the HM photos. and the Grizzly peak ones too.

[Rocker]

Dude, great photos! I love how clear and saturated the photos are. I especailly like the photos of Paradise Pier at night! Really co0l!

[disneyhound]

LOVE the photos!!! Too Cool...

[twobluestripes]

these are beautiful! i don't really understand this HDR stuff even though I wikipedia'd it; can someone explain it to me? is that what's responsible for the colors?
and i love the panoramas and the long focal lengths

[Datameister]

Originally Posted by twobluestripes

these are beautiful! i don't really understand this HDR stuff even though I wikipedia'd it; can someone explain it to me? is that what's responsible for the colors?
and i love the panoramas and the long focal lengths

When your camera takes a photo, its sensor can only capture so much information. If there's enough contrast in the scene, some areas will either be too dark or too bright, depending on the aperture and shutter speed. Areas that are too dark show up as nearly black, with some ugly noise to further obscure any detail; areas that are too bright are even worse, because they end up as "blown out" white highlights with no recoverable information. (Some programs can guess, but there basically isn't anything there except white.)

In some cases, that situation is okay. But sometimes you want to be able to capture everything in a scene, from the darkest darks to the brightest brights, and that's where HDR can be helpful. You take multiple photos from the exact same spot and expose them differently. Some'll be too dark, some'll be too bright, and some'll be somewhere in between. None of them will be perfect. But each individual area of the frame will be properly exposed somewhere in at least one of the numerous shots. Then you use software to merge all these shots into one single photo. The result has a wider dynamic range than the monitor--basically, the computer is storing a wider range of brightness information than the monitor can display. So then you make choices about how much you want to "squish" all that information into a viewable range. That part is harder to understand...I get how to do it, and I sorta understand the underlying concepts, but it's hard to wrap the brain around.

You can also merge the photos manually, area by area. I suspect that's how sgtfox did his, since there are bright halos where the image fades between different exposures. Ideally, those transitions shouldn't be visible at all, but it's easier said than done.

[Mojave]

Don't they have cameras now that do HDR automatically? You set up the HDR shot then hit the shutter release and it takes a bunch of photos in a row, all at different settings and then merges them together into one shot?

[Datameister]

I haven't heard of any that merge them in-camera--and I wouldn't trust it, anyway--but there are certainly cameras that do automatic exposure bracketing so you at least have the right photos when it's time to merge them on the computer.

[b236en]

Nice pictures the colors are great

[orbitalpunk]

great compositions.

did you shoot multiple exposures or did you take a single RAW image and reopen it at different exposures?

[jsdmn2]

wow.

just, wow.

awesome pics.

[Disneyland Daddy]

Amazing photos.

[BC_DisneyGeek]

Gorgeous photos!

Love the Haunted Mansion ones in particular, looks like a painting. Thanks for posting them.

[AlishainWonderland]

Thanks for posting! I'm loving the saturation of the colors and increased dynamic range is almost always a good thing--not to mention the fabulous compositions!--but you wanna be careful with the halos where the sky meets the darker foreground objects. They're showing up in nearly every shot involving blue sky, and they do ruin it a bit for me. The first shot and the first shot of the Matterhorn are probably the worst offenders. It's tough to get it right, but it's truly worth it. Anyway, keep up the great work!

Yeah, what he said. :-D

I love HDR. These are beautiful photos. Thanks so much for sharing! We're going to DL next weekend and I can't wait to break out the camera. I might play with some HDR, too. Thanks for the inspiration!