randomosity

I have been down­load­ing HDR images over the past few months and using them as desktop images because they are so evoc­at­ive. I was fas­cin­ated by this digital pro­cessing tech­nique and although I did find some good tech­nical explan­a­tions about how the effect was achieved, I didn’t quite get it. Until I found this fine little tutorial from Trey Ratcliff. He’s done a great job of explain­ing both the tech­nic­al­it­ies as well as provid­ing some easy to fol­low tutorials.

My cur­rent desktop looks like this (click to see very large — note that close box is in lower right corner of image):

Its a very curi­ously cluttered image I know and really a bit of an imprac­tical desktop, but its just so coool. I down­loaded it from BHo’s Flikr stream Its a Korean shipyard and heavy HDR.

There is a grow­ing volume of HDR pho­tos show­ing up on Flikr and other such services.

If you don’t know, High Dynamic Range ima­ging involves play­ing with the contrast,sometimes com­bin­ing pho­tos with dif­fer­ent expos­ures to cre­ate rather sur­real images. Col­ours pop and detail is made much more uni­formly exposed. In short the tech­nique makes a sort of unreality.

So you get very cool look­ing pho­tos. Although that in itself is some­thing, I was struck by Trey’s rationale for why he uses it. As he says, “I think it helps to evoke my actual memor­ies of the scene.” Intriguing. This state­ment gave me pause to think. It reminds me of the tech­nique used in Wim Wenders Until the End of the World where the vari­ous mem­bers of the fam­ily record their vis­ions through a soph­ist­ic­ated appar­atus to bring vis­ion to the blind mother. Record­ing what they see is one thing, but the second step in the pro­cess was to record what they saw, through remem­ber­ing, as an overlay/filter/clarifier. I don’t know why this has so stuck with me. This tech­nique though seems to be an inad­vert­ent part of the pro­cess. But it asks a ques­tion. What does a memory look like? Do we have pho­to­graphic recall, or are our memor­ies col­oured by other emo­tional or sen­sual aspects. I think every­one will agree that memor­ies clearly have attached emo­tions, tem­per­at­ure, smell, etc. I find it inter­est­ing that Trey feels that these images are a step closer to cap­tur­ing memor­ies than we can simply rely on achiev­ing by expos­ing CCDs to light. This HDR thing is curious.