It was a very seasonable Spring day this afternoon with highs (finally) in the upper 50s, low 60s. I spent some time down at Harkness Memorial State Park getting back into the swing of things with my particular brand of abstraction.

These photos were all processed with my brand new copy of Adobe Lightroom 1.0, which I purchased after participating in the public beta since it was released and I admit it, I’m hooked! The one photo here worth saying more about is the first one, an oddly glowing charcoal grill. I attempted a technique that has been generating a lot of buzz lately; so-called HDR or High Dynamic Range. I prefer to call it Compressed Dynamic Range because I think it’s more accurate, but I’ll do a whole post about that later on.

Suffice it to say, the photo was created by combining two photos with different exposure settings (handheld!). It takes a bit of Photoshop to make the slightly different handheld photos line up, but I’ll do a post about that some time, too. I should also mention that despite the veritable glut of software available for this (like Photomatix, Photogenics HDR, PanoTools, etc.), and because I am both cheap as well as old-school, I achieved the effect entirely in Photoshop.

Without further ado.