Madnessmatrix | Eric Bowers Photography

Three handheld RAWs // HDR // Shutter: varied // Aperture: f/22 // Focal Length: 17 mm // ISO 400

Photo taken Saturday, 1/31/09, Plaza, Kansas City.

Having received word of yet another protest on the Plaza taking place roughly around this period in time, I drove through the streets Saturday seeing if there were indeed any signs of civil dissent. Unfortunately I could find none that day, although with the seventy degree weather (in January!) people were everywhere - I stashed the car away and meandered hither and thither. I do find it borderline hilarious however that here in Kansas City, the choice place for protesting The Overlordship often defaults to a huge bourgeois shopping district.

Ryan, the street performer there in the foreground can also often be seen in the Crossroads area during the First Friday events.

I have never “Photoshopped” anything as much in all of my 10,370 days as I have with this photo, although ironically it doesn’t overtly indicate excessive editing, just by looking at it I thought.

Though I’ve been using multiple hand-held source images for HDR for awhile now, where I broke new ground in my methods here was doing it while knowing full well that I had a number of moving objects within the field of view, and all of this movement over multiple exposures (three in this case) complicates matters immensely when getting on the computer to give the photo the ‘ole spit-shine.

As I’ve been doing frequently now, I activated both the burst mode and the auto bracketing simultaneously for doing multiple source images for HDR handheld, used intuition to decide an ISO setting, and since I knew I was shooting into the sun I set the aperture as narrow as it would go in this particular lens, while shooting in aperture priority (sunrays are a lot more fun this way).

So the next order of business was getting this thing in some semblance of presentability, which took about seven hours total on the computer I believe, between Saturday afternoon and parts of Sunday, spanning the space of 34 separate saved copies. I took two tone-mapped images but with slightly different light smoothing settings and performed some reduction work via the Eraser Tool in Photoshop to help compensate for a halo problem with one setting, and the sunray highlights blowing out too much on the other tone-mapped version.

Then I had to take the mid-range RAW exposure of the three source images, and overlay the edited, tone-mapped image over that, and then again through the process of reduction try to rid the photo of the ghosting artifacts from the moving people and objects. Frequent use of the Clone Stamping Tool was done also, in addition to the Eraser - although things became considerably easier to manage after I converted the whole thing to black and white. Sometimes doing this brought about the need to increase contrast in one part of the photo while leaving the rest untouched - so some duplicates were made with curve adjustments - and yet further reductions ensued. I’m sure there are no doubt better and more efficient means of operating Photoshop than how I went about all this, so hopefully I’ll catch on to whatever’s out there.

Yeh - I do it all for fun. For Teh Lulz.