HDR and the Zoo

The boys had a teacher work day so we chose to get back to the zoo after a nearly two year hiatus. We headed out dressed semi appropriately for the cooler temps and packed a few sandwiches. I gotta say WOW after some time between visits the plantings (especially trees) have really grown. Same dolphin show tho :-) I loaded the Canon with my lens that even Heather calls crappy. Must be the worst lens ever made by Canon. But it's light and I don't worry about the boys banging it on anything while they are taking pictures (which I encourage)...So if the pics stink thats my excuse.

Here is Heather half-way through the picnic lunch...it's not lookin' good folks! (this look is in lesson three of the Parenting Class Heather is about to lead)...

So we recovered from that and moved on. Here she is much happier (obviously because I'm next to her). I'm hoping my new toupee looks natural and no one will notice:

Edit: No its not really a toupee...just photoshop

Here are a few shots of the boys since no one really "reads" this blog for anything else :0

Finally I tried some HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography techniques today. You take three shots of the same picture: one normal exposure, one under-exposed and one over-exposed. You then send it through a process that takes all three pictures and creates floating point values for the exposure versus integer values...but I digress. You run it through appropriate software and "BAM"... a wicked cool looking picture like this:

Stopping for Lunch at the Emerald Lake in the Andes (and a new photo-sharing thing)
Originally uploaded by Stuck in Customs

OK so I didn't get a picture quite like that (lets blame it on the overcast day and frankly, the subject) but here is one I tried (there is a watermark since I used shareware to create it)

Here is a one shot normal exposure to compare...no really it's neat! Kinda?!