A love for Polaroid

Instant gratification is an experience all of us should experience, especially on a Polaroid. Since the liberty of digital camera’s, our lives exist only in a computer, that’s sad. Only a few look back over our shoulders shoulders and breath the moment of instant gratification.

I was a 80’s kid, so my first experience of a polaroid camera is the on the 600 films, a square format film, composition was a whole lot of fun! The cameras that came with it was like handling a hippo, wild and unpredictable, exposure’s, colour, ISO was like a game of 30 seconds. The result…

Awesome photos if your goddess was around.

This is my second Polaroid, a “Spice Girl special” , wahoo…(I threw up a little there) see how I gave it a make over with my marker! 

This film and the camera soon died as the “geeks” took over. Like Polar bear we went back into hibernation and Polaroid became part of our dreams once more. The Japs were not happy... and soon in the Hi-Tech Head Quarters of Japan, gave birth to a baby… not an actual baby, that would be kinda disgusting, but to Fujifilm’s instax mini! Once again the Polariod bears broke free from their nightmare.

This is my third Polaroid camera, everything was small, you needed to place the film on a microscope to see anything. Despite the disappointment, this was their first attempt to bring Frankenstein back to life after a long 10 years. This gave hint that a better Frankenstein will also emerge from the dark, and  so it did…

Meet Swarchenegger’stein 2.0, a FujiFilm Instax 210. Wow, this was bigger then big, size of your Chiwawa and it took photos your grandma could see. It even comes with a macro lens attachment which means you could study photosynthesis.

There’s even a book on Frankenstein’s work, I urge you to pick one up and take a look how special Polaroids can be. It’s called “The Polaroid Book”.

One more thing,

It’s not a photo unless you print it!

Images on computer are called jpg, tiff, gif, etc… geek talk.

HDR... how does it work?

All those talk about film can't be replaced, blah blah blah, rubbish! Here is a technique that is unique to digital photography, HDR, High Dynamic Range.

You must first understand that you DSLR can only capture a portion of the histogram.

Let say you staring out your window (Purple histogram), the light that your eyes can see (Orange) is a lot higher than the digital camera can (Green).

So all that HDR is, is taking 4~7 different photographs so that you cover all the areas where the camera can't, like the camera is half blind!

Okay, that's all the tech talk you need to know!

Go find an awesome place, take 4 or more photographs capturing the whole histogram.

Take your perfect exposure, then work out the darkest range (use your histogram),

normally it's -8 f.stops; -4 f.stops; 0 (perfect exposure); +4 f.stops; +8 f.stops.

Moving in incriments of 4 clicks, you should end up with something like this:

 Now... you need the following tools:

- Aperture or Lightroom

- Photomatrix (http://www.hdrsoft.com)

Whack the series in Aperture or lightroom and combine them with Photomatrix.

Remember, only tune your white balance before merging, nothing else, do the rest once you have the HDR. Once you are done with the merging, you should end up with something like this:

The colour, lighting, contrast, detail is 4~7 time better than your original shot.

I've tried 5 different types of software, read over 6 books on this technique, trust me, this is the easiest way, don't waste your time researching on other stuff.

This is HDR, have fun guys. Feel free to contact me if you have any queries, i'll try my best to help you out as long as you share your final photo with me :)

The website launch

www.missingplanet.co.za

It's been 7 years of hard work to get this gallery up and running. Finally it's here!

Please support and help share the moments of our planet.
If you have any comments & suggestions, please share it with me, thanks so much!