Dumpster Diving
Posted on 23. May, 2009 by Terry Reinert in Photography
I woke up at 5:45am this morning due to my alarm going off. I had set it just 5 hours before with the intention of going out for a nice morning of photography. So I woke up, turned off the alarm, and immediately climbed back into bed with full intention of going back to sleep. After a few seconds of being back in bed I knew I would regret it if I didn’t go out so I got out of bed, got dressed, and left the house with my gear having no idea where I was going to go and what I was going to shoot. There were a lot of clouds and a slight amount of wind so there were no reflections off the water. I ended up going by the Melbourne Library and found a dumpster that had the sunrise in the background. I figured that making a dumpster look good was a challenging task so I grabbed my tripod (which I actually remembered to take with me this time) and went to work.
Canon 5D, 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM, ISO100, Photoshop / Photomatix / Lightroom
I shot 9 exposures from -4EV to +4EV at a 1EV spread. Those exposures were merged into a single HDR image using Adobe Photoshop CS3. I then opened the .HDR file in Photomatix Pro and tone mapped the image. I saved the tone mapped image as a 16-bit TIFF and opened it in Lightroom to make some basic adjustments to the color and brightness. I then exported it to a PSD file and took it back into Photoshop for more post processing. The wind had caused a lot of ghosting in the tree branches which I mostly resolved using the clone tool and blending in some of the original exposures using layers and layer masks. I also did a little bit of exposure blending on the sky to reduce the grainy nature of an HDR sky. Then I used the drawing with light technique to spot adjust the brightness of various parts of the image. Finally I darkened the border slightly, added the logo, re-sized, ran an unsharp mask, and saved as a JPG.
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Jamie
24. May, 2009
How funny that you can make dumpsters look so interesting. When I first got my camera I was very interested in HDR but I haven’t messed with it in soo long. Maybe you have inspired me to try it out again
Of course, it will probably be a vulture or something that is my subject. I found your blog through Flickr.. Wishing you good light.. Jamie
Dawn @ My Home Sweet Home
29. May, 2009
I never thought I’d say such a thing, but that’s a really beautiful picture of a dumpster.
Check out Dawn @ My Home Sweet Home’s lastest blog post.. Fun with Photoshop and My Big Day
Terry
08. Jun, 2009
LOL. I’ve heard that a lot regarding that photo. It’s funny because I was driving around that morning and was not feeling inspired at all. I was in that area and looked over and saw the sun rising and laughed to myself about how funny it would be to create a visually appealing photo of a dumpster. And the rest is history!
Nicholas A. Swann
20. Sep, 2009
A great shot..