I, the DSLR Dummy.

Yesterday, I decided to go back to an old hobby, photography. Lo and behold! I thought I was going back to an old hobby; I couldn't be further from truth...

In these few hours of reading manuals and toying with the camera, my first impression was that digital photography is quite similar to film photography—you shoot and you develop, minus the expensive dark room and supplies. Then, I read about High Dynamic Range Imaging and a small piece of the full power of a digital camera, plus image editing software, hit me like a rock.

First, a disclaimer. In the past, I used to shoot film with a Pentax K1000; mostly panoramas or portraits with a 35mm f/2.8 lens. I stop shooting film around ten years ago. In these ten years, I have used two or three point and shoot cameras from Sony—nothing fancy, always under 100usd.

In the last months, I've spent many weeks reading camera reviews with my best friend Orthus; this helped me to quickly choose the Pentax K-5 DSRL. It has very good specifications for shooting static and, in my neophyte opinion, beats the Nikon D7000 in all but video capabilities. Choosing the lens was the hard part, in the end, we choose the Sigma 17-50mm f/2.8 as our first call. I couldn't find it at the camera shop, so I settled down for a Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 that seems to have characteristics competing with the equivalent Sigma.

On the software side, I am a GPL fan; a completely ignorant GPL fan when it comes to raw developing and photo editing. The good thing is that I have my friend Orthus, he quickly pointed my way to RawTherapee for raw developing and Luminance for HDR. 

So, this is the result of my shooting Sunday...

Raw image:

Developed image (I just equalized the histogram a little bit):

HDR ( 5 shots, ±2 EV in steps of 1 EV, I just used the basic profile 1 for the HDR and toyed a little bit with the color saturation and contrast of the basic tone map. If this were film, I would think a gradient neutral density filter on the +2EV could help a lot, but that's something I need to read about):

I used to enjoy shooting, developing and printing with my old K1000; I really enjoyed my first photography Sunday. I foresee many days of reading manuals, downloading filters and toying with software in the future. It is great to remember the satisfaction of creating something, even when it is not so pretty as I wish it were.

Cheers!

Edit: Final disclosure, I took around 150 shoots and spent some 5 hours toying with Luminance to get the HDR file shown here. I said this because Lyx asked me if this was the only HDR image I made. I composed 10 HDR images from the sets of raw files, and filtered around 100 LDR images trying different tone maps and settings to get this one—the only one that I half liked.