HDRSource High Dynamic Range Images

My newly redesigned web­site, HDR­Source is up and run­ning again. In all actu­al­ity, it never really went any­where — I just had laid off pro­mot­ing it for sev­eral years as the real work with LunarStu­dio man­aged to keep me pre­oc­cu­pied. It’s one of the first online stores that sold HDRs and HDR libraries. I cre­ated HDR­Source when the term ‘HDR’  turned up around 20 links max­i­mum when ‘HDR’ was searched in Google — so it’s really been some­thing that I’ve worked on in the back­ground since the technique’s infancy. This site even pre­dates Photoshop’s sup­port for High Dynamic Range Images. As some of you might have fol­lowed, I’ve take time off this sum­mer to com­pletely update all of my web­sites, and this was the last web­site on my list. So I’m proud to announce once again that it is up and run­ning with newly-minted 360-degree images.

Orig­i­nally, HDR­Source was all hand-coded — long before the pop­u­lar­ity of blog­ging sys­tems and CMSs came into play. How­ever, hav­ing to man­u­ally update it every sin­gle time turned into a really big pain. That’s why I made the deci­sion to use a Word­Press instal­la­tion and to “fake it” into resem­bling more of a reg­u­lar, non-blogging look type of web­site. I have absolutely no regrets with this sys­tem now. I don’t have to fid­dle with Pho­to­shop every time I want to insert a graphic. I don’t have to open up Dreamweaver and peck through code — try­ing to remem­ber every sin­gle time what I had did and what each piece of CSS stood for. It’s sim­ply, much eas­ier to main­tain and update. And if I want to add addi­tional func­tion­al­ity, then that’s mostly a breeze as well. Plus, I know search engine opti­miza­tion — and if you look closely, I have all of those tools mostly at my disposal.

As for the HDR­Source web­site itself, it caters mostly to the 3-D com­mu­nity and ties in directly with my work at Lunarstu­dio. It’s a store that spe­cial­izes in High Dynamic Range pho­to­graphic panora­mas which I have man­u­ally pro­duced. 3-D artists some­times use HDRs to sur­round and light 3D mod­els and scenes. It is a form of tech­nique which we often call Image Based Light­ing — or IBL for short. HDRs tend to lend a real­is­tic look to our mod­els because of the nuances in light­ing, vari­a­tions in color, as well as reflec­tions. They can make a flat, almost toon-like 3d model into some­thing real­is­ti­cally con­vinc­ing. The dif­fer­ences between using them and not using them can often be quite drastic.

HDR orig­i­nally has its roots in com­puter graph­ics research — and assisted 3D artists. As Pho­to­shop released it’s first basic import option, it started to gain the inter­est of the gen­eral pho­tog­ra­phy com­mu­nity. Soon, pho­tog­ra­phers set out to cap­ture some pretty remark­able pho­tographs using the HDR tech­nique. How­ever, while I appre­ci­ate many pho­tog­ra­phers adven­ture into this avenue, I’ve some­what insisted on stay­ing a purist for the 3d world. My pho­tos gen­er­ally don’t have what some call and over-saturated ‘radioac­tive’ glow to them. I pre­fer mine to match exactly what the human eye can capture.

If you have a moment, please head on over there and check out my pho­tog­ra­phy work. I’m not ask­ing any­one to buy any­thing — per­haps you’ll sim­ply get a ‘kick out of’ brows­ing some of my 360 degree HDR panoramic image.

HDR­Source High Dynamic Range Images

www.hdrsource.com