Haikyo HDR photos or not… that was a big questions two years ago.
From the start I wanted to keep Abandoned Kansai simple. A blog instead of a homepage, photos directly out of the camera instead of massive post production – resize to 1024*680, URL in the lower right corner. That’s it. No cropping, not filters, no nothing. I actually shoot in JPG, for almost two years not even in the highest resolution. All the photos published on Abandoned Kansai are done that way. After some positive comments I started to take a few photos in NEF, just in case; maybe 2 or 3%, not one of them I ever opened. When I got a tripod, I started to use the bracket function of my D90 at maybe every fifth location – again just in case. After a while I played around with a freeware HDR program, just for fun. While I like the aesthetics of tone-mapped HDR photos I still consider them mostly a gimmick. Nevertheless I decided to publish some of my experiments – below are two samples, *for more haikyo HDR photos please click here*.
(Updates will be announced on *Twitter* and *Facebook*, not on the main page.)
Haikyo HDR Photos
2011/12/03 by Florian / Abandoned Kansai
I am always dissappointed by the over-use of HDR when it comes to urban exploring. Watching such pics makes me for some reason – literally – sick. Therefore I kind of like your keep it simple approach and even your HDR experiments – they seem like pencil drawings. Very nice, very informative, very entertaining. Keep up the good work – photograph and research wise.
Thanks a lot for your kind words! To me tonemapped HDR is a nice gimmick, nothing more. I got lucky that I found “my” style of doing it by chance when playing around with a freeware program for an hour or two – most people actually hurt their photos that way IMHO. Nevertheless it will stay a sub-page with no more updates on the main page. It’s just an extra. The unedited photos and my research on the places on the other hand are the basis for this blog. Sadly there will be more and more places in the future I know hardly anything about – because they were never finished, because they were abandoned long before the age of the internet or because they were too insignificant for anybody to write about in the first place. On the other hand I have articles in the making about places stunning beautiful and full of history…