[HDR image – a composite of 10 photos – of a waterfall in the town of Woodstock, NY]

09/21/09 I attended a workshop on producing High Dynamic Range images at the Center for Photography at Woodstock over the weekend and I learned a lot. HDR is a digital technique that uses multiple RAW images (sometimes as many as 15 or 16 photos) of varying exposures and crunches them into a huge (32-bit) perfectly exposed image with detail in both shadows and highlights. It’s sometimes called “the Zone System on steroids.”  The camera needs to sit on a tripod due to the long exposures and the need for the photos to match each other so the most common application for HDR is landscape photography. Not always though.  My instructor, Dan Burkholder, produced an amazing book on the destruction caused by Katrina using HDR to document the wrecked interiors of buildings. He calls HDR “the most exciting development in photography since the zoom lens.”

Woodstock is just across the Hudson  river from my family’s farm.  I’ve been there a bunch of times over the years and it never changes.  It’s become a Mecca for the tie dye crowd despite the fact that the actual concert which took the town’s name happened many miles away. I can remember seeing hippies bathing in the stream above during my first visit to the town as a young boy.