I am pleased to announce that I will be contributing over at HDRLabs.com as a co-blogger. Christian Bloch (author of The HDRI Handbook) has invited me into his world of “HDR Nuts” as he calls it. I choose to view us as pixel warriors or digital knights. Regardless of the geeky analogies, the truth is we are all fighting the war on exposure and trying to defeat the same enemy.  It is a challenge for photographers, cinematographers and VFX artists alike.  I’m thrilled to be a part of the site and hope to make a positive impact in the months and years to come.

I do not plan to abandon this blog.  I will likely mirror many of the posts over at HDR Labs here and I’m sure there will be times I want to discuss non-HDR information that might just be basic photography gear or such, and will post those here rather than clutter HDR Labs blog.

Many of you have also expressed interest in some form of training from myself and I have actually been working on a few projects at once so I’ll share what is going to emerge in the weeks and months ahead.

I have just crossed the threshold of having shot roughly 14,000 HDRs that I tonemapped into final JPEG/TIFF formats for commercial delivery for clients (mostly incredibly high dynamic range real estate scenes).  Because of this extensive experience with tackling exposure day to day for going on 5 years now, I have a unique view of HDR from a production pipeline point of view.  I’ve also shot and edited well over 1000 landscapes which were bracketed, merged to HDR and tonemapped, “for fun”.  I’m quite familiar with the dos, don’ts and work arounds relating to HDR Capture and Post Processing.

That said, a few things are in the very early stages of planning for eBooks, Video Training, Workshops and/or One on One Training.  These are the concepts I’m working on:

1. A beginner’s guide to HDR from my vantage point (from capture to final edit).  I’ll cover the best HDR apps to merge to HDR and tonemap (on both the PC and the Mac).
2. Advanced techniques for going beyond basic tone mapping and extensively tweaking RAW images as a 1st step BEFORE merging to HDR.  Also, how to utilize layers in 32 bit space in Photoshop “BEFORE” moving on to tonemapping or luminance blending techniques. How to sweeten and further enhance tonemapped TIFFs in Photoshop for perfect color clarity and color balance of mixed lighting and/or final exposure issues.
3. A workshop specifically aimed at Real Estate and Architectural Photographers (either group workshop or one-on-one training). I won’t be teaching basics or staging. The focus will be about how to either shoot exclusively with only available light in a HDR post production pipeline or how to integrate HDR along with your flash / continuous lighting frames taken to enhance lighting and add a new touch to your work. I will open pandora’s box and show you all the tips and tricks I use from capture through post production.