This weekend the USA commemorates the women and men who have died serving our country. Being close to Washington, DC, there is a lot of activity around Memorial Day. For example, motorcycles for Rolling Thunder rumbling through the streets. Additionally, military and political leaders are visible at ceremonies. Finally, many families get together for a 3-day weekend. Even if they do not have a military connection, they are enjoying the benefits of their service.
The grounds of Arlington provide an especially beautiful backdrop to remember military service. Moreover, if they are family members, it is a reverent place to visit and honor their sacrifice. For one thing, Arlington is full of soldiers with recognizable names. Comparatively, there are some who are unknown to this day. For this reason, I understand the reverence given to fallen soldiers that were never identified.
Although this is a famous burial ground, every part of the country has a similar area. If you get a chance, visit and spend some time reflecting on what they have done. Above all, Thank YOU toall that continue to serve.
One of the first lessons I learned in photography was that cameras “see” much different from the human eye. If you look around a closed room, then out a window, not only does the eye focus much faster than any lens, but it can take in much more detail than you realize. This happens so quickly, that you do not even realize drastic light condition changes. With this in mind, HDR photography can render a scene closer to this.
High Dynamic Range Photography
When studying photography, you can see that you have to make compromises. In a high contrast scene, such as a bright sunny day, you cannot have a blue sky and shadowless subjects in the foreground without some help. You either have a beautiful sky with your subjects in silhouette, or dark shadow, or you have a completely “blown out” white sky with detail in your foreground subject. You do have some options if you want to manipulate the light such as flash or bouncing light to your subjects with a reflector, but I want to post today about another new option that has become popular with the advancement of computers – HDR or High Dynamic Range photography.
HDR is an option for shooting with the new iPhone 5. The idea behind it is to take multiple images of your scene. In a 3-image HDR, one of the images will be underexposed, one will be exposed properly as determined by your meter, and one will be overexposed. Here is an example from the FDR Memorial in Washington, DC. I took these during late morning – the sun was already high in the sky, and it was difficult to get both a blue sky in the photo, and to read the text on the memorial.
In this first photo, the frame is overexposed but you can clearly read the text. The sky is bright white with no detail, and some of the cherry blossoms are washed out as well.
This is the correctly exposed photo using the Matrix Metering in my Nikon DSLR. It is the most even across the frame in terms of dark tones and light tones.
This is the underexposed frame – most everything is in shadow, only good detail in the sky and other bright parts of the frame. With these 3 images, you combine them in software. For this, I used Google’s Nik HDR Efex pro 2. The software stacks the images, and uses calculations to increase the dynamic range of light and dark tones in the photograph to get a better approximation of what your eye sees when you are standing at the memorial. Let me know it turned out! There are many plugins and other techniques to combine with HDR to make scenes look either more realistic, or surrealistic depending on your preferences. It is always nice to have options. Here is the final HDR photo –
Being a native of the area, I have taken for granted being so close to many historical places. Virginia’s history as part of the United States is as long as any other state. This is due to its early settlement by European explorers. With so many of the early leaders and architects of our system of government, it has always played a key role in shaping our nation.
One famous Virginian, George Washington, decided that part of Virginia should be part of the capital city. Since it is close to the middle of the original 13 states, it would donate part of its land with Maryland to make the nation’s capital city. He surveyed a perfect diamond shape for the city on a map creating Washington, DC. Today, the land under that diamond south of the Potomac River is now Arlington County, VA. This is why the District is no longer a perfect square shape. The whole story of which was recently documented in the History Channel program, “How The States Got Their Shapes“.
Federal Markers
In order to mark the 10-mile boundary of the original square shape for Washington, DC, Andrew Ellicott was tasked by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, to place boundary stones marking the border of the city. Since moving closer to the city last year, I found out that we live very close to the stones in the Virginia side in Falls Church. We took out the smartphone to find the markers on the map, and found 2 – the West Cornertone and SW 9 stone. Both are very accessible and fenced off making them very easy to spot and view. This was a very satisfying find! I’ll be on the lookout for others.
