Northern Italian Alpine lake village, go:
This is another example of how a little HDR makes a big difference.
Tomorrow: photos from Thursday, including lunch in Lugano.
When you're crossing Lake Como from Cadenabbia to Bellagio on a sunny day, it looks like this:
I've also uploaded a full-sized JPEG (15 MB) to Azure storage. Enjoy.
I can imagine why the Catholic Church build Gallio Palace on the shore of Lake Como:
We didn't make it to the palace because we were distracted by food. I'll have more to say about Wednesday's dinner in my next couple of posts.
The Venetian church, viewed from the terrace of the Hotel Danieli:
I took 324 photos on Monday, so I'm not all the way through them yet. I'll just start with a photo of our hotel's lobby. We stayed at the Hotel Danieli, a 193-year-old hotel in a 600-year-old building:
This was our one hotel splurge. I do not know the exact bill, except that it was approximately the same as the next four nights' lodging combined.
I'd have photos to post already, but Adobe Lightroom 6 keeps dying on my Surface. It works when I install it, but the next time I try to open it, even after a reboot, it gets to the splash screen and stops loading.
I hope to resolve this later today.
As I'm still getting to know Lightroom 6 and its HDR feature, I wanted to revisit this one from 2013:
Here's the refresh. I think it's a more subtle result, and looks more like what I actually saw in Hampstead Heath:
On my next trip (in two days), I'll probably take a lot more HDR-ready images. The Canon 7D Mark II does a sort-of draft HDR in-camera, with a number of options for generating the raw files that my old camera didn't have. I'm looking forward to the results.
Less than 24 hours ago, I put my old camera on Craigslist: $500 for the body, two old lenses, the battery pack and charger, and a 32 GB CF card.
This afternoon, someone stopped by my office, played with the camera for five minutes, handed me $450 in cash, and that was it.
Thank you, Craig. That was remarkably painless.
I'm not sure this produced a significantly different photo, but I've done another quick HDR image with Lightroom. First, the basic shot, posted the day after my visit to the Joint Security Area on the North-South Korean border:
Here's the first HDR attempt posted a week later:
And here's one with Lightroom 6:
The second HDRI used different source images, but only from a few seconds later. Are they significantly different? Maybe insignificantly? I must ponder...
Upgrading my camera unfortunately meant I had to upgrade Adobe Lightroom as well. But I discovered that Lightroom 6 has a basic HDR feature, which I didn't expect. For a long time I've been taking bracketed images in order to make HDR images, and then forgetting about them. Images like this one:
For comparison, here's the non-HDR image I posted back in February:
In this case, the HDR imagery expanded the dynamic range of the image without making it look really bizarre. I think it's a stronger photograph as a result, though the bottom image is still pretty.