davidinman(.net) » Heather Lake, HDR Madness, and Color Profile Badness

Heather Lake, HDR Madness, and Color Profile Badness Friday, August 1, 2008 at 12:03 am

I am very slow at this, and do apologize. Here are pictures and related explanations from the trip to Heather Lake. Like many of my trips (though unlike the Rainier one), I took this with a Christian fellowship group I got to know last year, and of course had a blast. Posting this means I’m only one week behind, as last weekend I went to see a friend and we took excursions to the the rain forest and… well, I suppose I will get to that when I have the pictures ready. Well, that is, I will be only one week behind if I can catch up before Saturday. This I find doubtful. My weekends from here until when I leave are booked up with hiking – and I’m excited about it! I went a bit mad on taking HDR shots at Heather Lake, some of which I’ve put up here, though some are so awful it’s not worth showing them to anyone. I’ll point them out as I go.

As an aside, I spent about two hours (after getting the photos otherwise ready) navigating Photoshop’s abysmal color management system to get the colors here to appear as they do on my desktop. Apparently I will sometimes have to manually convert them each to sRGB (as the Save For Web converter is, for whatever reason, not working today). Annoying, but necessary. Now I have to decide if it’s worth going back to Flickr to try to correct this problem not only for this batch but many other batches of photos that I’ve uploaded. This is an issue that has been annoying me for well nigh a year – maybe more – but now the prospect of going back and correcting everything is rather daunting. (Stupid technology not working easily…) At least I haven’t had any problem with this affect printing (the end-goal of all this, you know). Anyways, a-here we go:

I am often distracted, when I am photographing or hiking (or photohiking?) by minutiae on the forest floor.

I did find, by wandering off and separating myself from the group (bad David!) this little waterfall created by a bunch of fallen logs. This one’s an HDR merge.

Unfortunately, I can’t really pry myself away from the distraction of minutiae. Their textures and microcosms call out to me.

A view of Heather Lake itself, with a fallen pine tree in the foreground, nearly touching the lake. This is also an HDR merge.

The last shot I’ll share, also an HDR, and a more stereotypical mountain lake. But I like it nonetheless.

So what have I learned about HDR? Well, the first is that it takes skill and steadiness to pull it off, and it can be really effective. The second thing is that because it is such a powerful tool, it can easily be overdone. Volatile: Handle with care! But I’m still learning (always). Oh, and do check out Stuck in Customs for some real HDR work. Over and out.