New Blog!

Photography has always been a passion of mine. In the last few years I have been working to turn that passion into a career. Discussing techniques and equipment has helped me gain a better understanding of photography and has helped my overall image quality. I would like to do the same here. I will post images and discuss the equipment and techniques involved in capturing the moment. If you have topics that you would like to discuss please let me know either by email or in the comments section.

This image was taken from Mounds Park. It is one of my favorite spots to capture sunsets of the downtown St. Paul skyline. This is a nine exposure HDR processed in Photoshop CS5, Lightroom 3, and Photomatix Pro. The gear used was my Nikon D700 with a 24-70mm f2.8 at iso 200. I mounted the camera on my tripod because the nine exposures needed to be precisely lined up plus some of the longer exposures were too long to hand hold without camera shake. The last piece of equipment was a cable release. This allows me to control the shutter without physically touching the camera.

After importing the images into Lightroom the first step is to process the HDR in Photomatix Pro. From there I loaded the tonemapped file into Photoshop CS5 along with the nine component images. After masking out a few problem areas, a little dodging and sharpening, the image went back into Lightroom for final adjustments.

If there are any images that you like and want prints of check out my galleries at www.DanGerberPhotography.smugmug.com.  If you would like something custom please contact me and we will work towards what you want.