Chuang yen monastery pics

[mathjak107]

took a ride about 50 minutes from new york city in the town of kent just near carmel in putnam county and found an amazing buddist monastery ...it looks like a set from a bruce lee movie and is one of the most peacful serine place i ever had the pleasure of being in.....

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[crazy connie]

That place looks like a great place to run away to again! Great pics. Thank you for sharing.

 

[W2R]

Beautiful! What a surprise it must have been to come across this place.

 

[bright eyed]

what vivid pics! beautiful! what camera are you using?

 

[mathjak107]

its not the camera, my wife and i use both a nikon d300 and d80....... its a combination of nailing the exposure right and processing as a single hdr photo where normally you would use multiple exposure photos and merge them. we use only one exposure and do whats called slight light inversions which give an almost artsey look.

heres an example we took a few weeks ago

 

[mathjak107]

 

[bssc]

Cool pictures, thanks for sharing.

 

[riskadverse]

Nice technique - can you explain your process in a little more detail? I've read about HDR and multiple exposures. Is this working from raw images?

 

[ERD50]

Personal preference of course, but I find these a bit too "cartoonish" for my tastes. Yes, they stand out and grab your attention at first glance, and are impressive in that way, but do I really want my pics to look so unreal?

I think the subject and framing is really good though, I just would prefer them toned down and more realistic.

I definitely want to play with HDR to capture high dynamic range scenes (bright whites and shadows in the same pic), but the goal would be to make them more realistic, not less so.

I'm not one of those people to turn up the bass and treble to TEN to get "better" sound, either. So maybe it's just me.

-ERD50

 

[mathjak107]

ooooh man i love my bass and treble controls....

actually you can merge the exposures in hdr with barley a hint of anything out of the ordinary if you so choose....the only give away is all the details in the shadows are preserved and if you look at the origionals you will see they are lost..

when i decide to hdr pictues i like that artsey look... not as wild as some of the stuff out there but i wouldnt call it subtle at all......

my feeling is if your doin it, do it!

 

[mathjak107]

Nice technique - can you explain your process in a little more detail? I've read about HDR and multiple exposures. Is this working from raw images?

Its software called photomatix.... in a nutshell since a camera sensor cant see what our eyes do they cant capture wide contrast scenes with out blowing out bright stuff so skys are white or turquoise or loosing dark detail so its so dark its black....

we take 3 exposures 2 stops apart and merge them.... we then tweek them in a way that does light inversions making dark things lighter and light things darker.... a road can be lighter then a sky.... depending where we do these pinches we can get a artsey look

 

[bright eyed]

That is pretty cool! will put it on my list of things to look into when i have a minute...hehe thanks for sharing!