So the wedding season has begun in earnest with weekends booking quickly as brides rush to secure that perfect day. Granted, I have nothing to do with that, at least not yet but that's what I hear from Aaron. If you're looking to book a wedding with Aaron (and possibly me), you better contact him soon. 2010 is already filling up!

Jeremy and Andrea were married in Cozumel in January. They had a destination wedding and from the pictures they had, it looks like they had a great time. Since their family and friends couldn't all be there, they renewed their vows here and had a great reception.

I was a little rusty getting back into shooting a wedding so I overcompensated and took over 700 pictures. After going through in Lightroom, I rejected about 400~. Hopefully, that ratio will change in the coming months.

Here are some shots from the wedding:

Before I get into the subject, a brief revisitation on the topic of HDR.

The debate on HDR is one that can go on from now until the end of time. In this corner, there are those who see it as a powerful tool, allowing for more detailed photographs. In the other, critics see it as a gimmic and strange.

"It doesn't look real." is their sharpest remark and they have a point. Most who are new to doing HDR and even those who would style themselves as HDR experts use a heavy hand, bringing out far too much detail and color. If that is the artists goal..fine but on the whole, it's not, it's just misuse of the technique.

While I can understand being put off by surreal HDR images, I find myself tripping over the statement "It doesn't look real.". When I take a picture and the foreground is dark because I exposed for the sky or vice versa, I really don't figure that as real either. I think of that as a limitation of the technology. Perhaps we consider these exposures real because that's what we've known photography to be for so long. We've gotten so used to expecting a loss of detail in our photographs that now with an abundance of detail in a photograph we are immediately alarmed. That can't be right. There aren't that many wrinkles on my face...are there?

There are and there is that much detail. I'll grant you that color saturation (especially for red) can be overdone in HDR if you'll admit to me that a blown out sky in on a nice spring day is not real. If it is, you're living in limbo.

With that said, I turn to a couple images I did the other night. Since I haven't shot anything in awhile, I decided to revisit some shots I had taken several weeks ago. In Photomatix 3, you can use one RAW file to generate an HDR and then tonemap it. Ideally you would want to use different exposures but since RAW has so much information stored in it, this works pretty well although I have noticed it generates a lot of noise. Maybe I'm just doing something wrong.

Where I find this valuable, beyond when I forget to do a regular HDR, is with people. I've never done an HDR that has people in it because they move and that hurts the HDR process. There are ways to work with this but that's another project for another day. But if you are only using one shot, there is no movement. You're just changing the settings on that same file.

For fun I took this image of Gail and Tucker I made to see what the differences would be. This is version I came up with in Lightroom:



This is the version I made after generating the HDR and then tonemapping it in Photomatix:



While I like the results from the HDR, I must admit that I think the Lightroom version is better. I think the extra detail in the trees and such, darkened the image, giving it a different mood. Also, Gail's nails are too bright but that's the red issue I find with HDR.

I found that it worked better with this image:



I think you'd be hard pressed to call this out as an HDR image. My biggest complaint is I think Gail's hair looks too grainy now.

An issue, and no offense to Gail or Tucker, but this process definitely spotlights wrinkles and other facial blemishes. Using the Portraiture plugin brought their skin tones back down to something more accurate. One area where more detail is not wanted nor needed.

Single file HDR is neat and I think it produced some interesting results. I don't think I'd use it every time but it is another tool in the chest.