[HDR-photo] Introduction - new member

[Luke Kaven]

Hello all!

I'm new to the HDR list, and wanted to say hello and introduce myself.  From
reading earlier threads, there are some interesting people here and I hope
to meet some of you along the way some day.

I'm a record producer who is known for a jazz recording label called Smalls
Records, and I'm a photographer who mostly concentrates on artist portraits
and performances, though I occasionally venture into other subjects.  Though
I've taken photographs for many years (with some long breaks), I've recently
come to a period of creative rediscovery, brought about in large part by the
artistic possibilities afforded by HDR (and in part due to a love affair
with a Nikon D3).  I'm a big fan of Photomatix and hope to see the
developers succeed in a position of leadership in a growing area.

I believe that HDR is in many ways a more encompassing notion of photography
than any traditional notion, and that in many ways, I believe that with
suitable refinements and advances, it can be at both the center and the
forefront.  For one thing, traditional photography can be thought of as just
sitting on the scale of dynamic range at the lower end of the scale wherein
"LDR" photography is just a more trivial case of HDR photography.  I feel
that LDR photography has no special privilege and no claim to being
"normal", and, whether you use a 9-stop slice of light, or a 15-stop slice
of light, is a matter of choice, but ultimately the same thing.

I think that we are going to see more and more techniques for supersampling
scenes, perhaps going under different names, but that we are talking about
largely the same thing.  We strive to record every part of a scene
faithfully regardless of the range of light values, working with the
practical limitations of our recording media, and then we try to map those
recorded values onto a display surface of our choice, and choose how to
render within the range of the display medium.  This is photography of any
kind, articulated from this new perspective.

For a while now, I've been expecting to see supersampling techniques being
incorporated into cameras.  I see that Fuji now has started to do something
like that with its dual capture EXR technology.  I think this is just the
beginning.  There may be a future in developing cameras that can supersample
a scene (using whatever method, including near-instantaneous multiple
exposures with a single click) and produce a 32-bit RAW image file, and
optionally a tonemapped image.  It can be done now.  I'd like to see the
people at Photomatix be in the forefront of that.

As someone who uses HDR primarily for portraiture, these kinds of advances
would be a big boost to my efforts.  I really think that once the practical
aspects of HDR are addressed, it will become usable for the entire range of
subjects, and it will be the new normal.

I have some questions, but I'll save those for the next note.

All the best, Luke

Some of my recent works
www.smallsrecords.com/art/galleria/gallery-hdr.htm

Smalls Records
www.smallsrecords.com