3 Custom Car Photos – Verp or Cool?

Custom Car Photography – HDR

1956 Buick Special, custom car, mesa cruise, hdr
Special Ed’s 1956 Buick Special shot at the Mesa Cruise – 10/24/2010 (click on shot to zoom!)

What’s HDR? In case you forgot, my friend Alan wrote a great story about “High Dynamic Range” or HDR. What it is, how he does it and a few resulting shots.  Alan’s Car Photography HDR. Since Alan introduced me to HDR, I’ve always wanted to try it. I have a Nikon D90 that makes bracketing photographs easy so it was finally time to try it.

How’d I do?

For me, HDR either makes a WOW effect where I can’t imagine seeing something so beautiful, (just so you know, I have a soft-spot for sunsets) or the photo looks too digital, faked and generally induce a three-quarter verp.  There’s certain amount of funky-artsy-cool in the shot in both cases, but obviously, I’m shooting for the WOW.  Right now, I think I’m still over digitized, pretty noisy (in film it was “grainy”) and showing I’ve never done this before.  Gonna work on it…

In my defense, I used the first free HDR software set I could find. It’s called “Luminance HDR” Download it here. I’d say the software was fairly easy to use and I was able to combine it with “The Gimp” (the free photo editing software I use cause I don’t own and haven’t taken the time to learn Photoshop) with the help of a tutorial. Here’s that tutorial. There are several options and selections to try (none with explanations about what they are!) and I was running through those trying to figure it out… then Luminance kept crashing. Crap. If I stick with this, I’ll buy one of the more well know HDR softwares out there.

1964 Chevy, pickup, truck, C10, air bagged, 1960s chevy pickup trucks
(I love how you can see the lower control arms sitting on the ground!)

Here are a couple other shots I took. These are both of my buddy Erock’s newly painted 1964 Chevy Pickup. Both of these are made with Luminance, but you can see the effects can vary quite a bit. If you dig it… let me know!

1964 Chevy, truck, pickup, C10, air ride, 1960s chevy pickup trucks

MyRideisMe.com is always looking for photographers! If you’d like to share your work, please get in touch. Send email to moc.emsiedirymnull@nimdA

I’d love to hear your comments!

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