HDR Magic
Jan 20, 2007
- Dang, I can feel the cold.
- What a shot, whoa, and what power! Check out his entire gallery.
- National History Museum, London.
- A colorful reflexion.
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I hate to mix your inspirational topics with your depressing ones, but I had a thought.
For a long time I've wondered if there was (to some small extent) a connection between Islam's prohibitions on art and it's emphasis on triumphalism (conquest, hostility etc). It's as if without fantasy, Muslims have nothing to dream about but paranoid conspiracies and conquest...
But looking at those beautiful photographs made me think, there may not be a prohibition on photography because it isn't drawing or painting, it's a mechanical reproduction... Is that the case? What is the state of photography as an art form in the Muslim world?
As a cultural contrast, I notice that in my Japanese dictionary "tanabata" is listed as:
1. The festival of the Weaver (July 7th) star festival
2. Prayer ceremony for children's artistic development
I'm sure that Muslims don't pray for their children to become artists... Though I suspect that this Japanese-English dictionary (written online by westerners) isn't exactly reliable. Wikipedia says "In the Edo period, girls wished for better sewing and craftsmanship, and boys wished for better handwriting by writing wishes on strips of paper. At this time, the custom was to use dew left on Taro leaves to create the ink used to write wishes." Pretty, but not precisely artist ability.
Posted by: Josh Scholar | Jan 20, 2007 at 07:25 PM
Josh Scholar: I'll address your comment in a later post. It will be up soon.
Posted by: Isaac Schrödinger | Jan 20, 2007 at 08:37 PM
Although there must be less of a draw to photography when it can't be used to take pictures of women, at least for most men.
Posted by: Josh Scholar | Jan 20, 2007 at 08:56 PM
By the way, googling for HDR cameras I found this little thing that even a poor person can afford ($130).
If you scroll down this page you'll see that the sensor array has both tiny sensors for highlights and large sensors for shadows...
Some weirdnesses that the review mentioned. I think this camera suffered from being first generation. It can only use the high dynamic range if you set it to save in raw mode (uncompressed images) and deliberately overexpose the picture. You may need special software to read the raw images too.
Posted by: Josh Scholar | Jan 22, 2007 at 01:25 AM
By the way did you know that you can search FLICKR for images tagged HDR?
Posted by: Josh Scholar | Jan 22, 2007 at 03:19 AM
^^ That's how I browse around, find and then link to the best HDR images from flickr.
Posted by: Isaac Schrödinger | Jan 22, 2007 at 03:32 AM
Most of the HDR pictures have unnatural looking range compression, some of them don't even have high range sources but someone ruined the picture with a range compression filter anyway..
I used to do a lot of graphics programming. Maybe I should write a range compression filter that doesn't suck.
Also I tried to print out a HDR picture of a forest (it was only HDR in that the sunlight through the trees didn't overload the sensor). But it didn't print at all. The feeling of sunlight was completely gone. I suspect that prints just don't have the range to display HDR images. This is a projection/CRT only medium.
Posted by: Josh Scholar | Jan 22, 2007 at 02:36 PM
That print turns out to look pretty good in sunlight.
It depends on the lighting then.
Posted by: Josh Scholar | Jan 22, 2007 at 05:20 PM