Guess what I found?

My Kodak Z1285 will do automatic bracketing! Well, maybe you don't get excited about this, but I do. In burst mode, it will take three shots with as much as plus or minus one stop. This means I can tinker with high dynamic range photography in Zoner Photo Studio.

That photo up above in an HDR image. This next one is the 'middle' exposure that it's based on. Click through for the full size photos.



OK, maybe you're not as excited about it as I am, but try to understand the background. Ansel Adams devised the Zone System over 70 years ago. Among other things, it's photography that mimics the way we see. Our eyes and brains put together images that have extreme contrast from light to dark. An object might be in full sunlight in part of our visual field and in deep shade in another, yet we can see all of it. Film and digital cameras don't see that way. They can extract detail from only one part of the field, so if the light parts are properly exposed, the dark parts are lost.

HDR takes multiple images at different exposures and combines them.

Of course, what's a day without some rusty - or formerly rusty - old equipment? This locomotive was quietly decaying in the Owasso rail yard until a group of local enthusiasts bought it and restored it. It's now on display across from Webster School along Old Route 66 (Southwest Boulevard) in Tulsa. And yes, I tinkered with it, but it's not an HDR image. Maybe next time.

I did stumble across a nice old truck, though. This was over-exposed so I played with the image.



I'll have to go back and revisit some of those places armed with new knowledge about getting better images. Oh, and before I forget, there are more over on my Picasa web albums. I uploaded some dance photos from Skiatook, and added to the existing albums for old cars and railroad stuff. I used three cameras: the Nikon N6006, the Kodak Z1285, and the workhorse Yashica Electro 35GT.