Recently I have been getting into photography in a big way, it’s something I touched upon at college but I never really progressed with it because I found design to be more satisfying. Black and white photography really appeals to me because it seemed to capture the ‘story’ and ‘passion’ better than conventional colour photos.
Now, I have never been overwhelmed with colour photos before until I stumbled across a style of colour photography that I have never seen before, which to be honest made my creative mind spin and juices seep through my skin. This style of photography is called HDRi (High Dynamic Range imaging), where a series of photos are taken of the same subject, adjusting the EV (exposure value) on each (starting with a minimum range of between -2 and +2 EV), most efficiently with AEB (automatic exposure bracketing) then processed together with ‘Tone Mapping‘ to produce a truely amazing photo, or in more simpler terms, combining a series of seemingly ugly looking photos together to create one outstanding image, with amazing detail, colour and depth of field.
The key to achieving a good HDR effect is in the software you use, rather than the camera gear you have. Anybody with a half decent point-and-click camera which has AEB and/or manual EV settings can achieve this. Now because I’m just getting into photography I challenged myself to see how far I can push my Panasonic Lumix TZ3 and bought some software called Photomatix Pro from HDR Soft.
Like all british folk I like to save some pennies if I can so I Googled for a discount coupon for Photomatix Pro and found two coupons that actually worked. The first offered a 8% discount VPG8 and the second offered a 15% discount beforethecoffee.
- Go to the Photomatix order page
- Click the buy button for the software version you need
- In the box where it says “Coupon Code (Optional)” put in: beforethecoffee
- Click the recalculate button
- It will show you the special discount applied with your new price
- Complete the rest of the order form
So very pleasingly I knocked off £8.13 off the price, making it £46.06 + VAT, result! It’s worth also mentioning that as standard, if you say buy 10 licenses, you automatically get a discount, equivalent to £40.64 a license, but then with this discount coupon you can get it down to £34.55 + VAT each!
December 14th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
[...] how for he has come since first starting out in HDR. He uses a specialist piece of software called Photomatix to combine his multiple exposures of the same scene to generate a full HDR image with Tone Mapping. [...]