Mississippi State University employee Matt Warren has embarked on a new project: taking high dynamic range (HDR) photos of the state.
The Columbus resident is a web designer and art enthusiast who has always found interest in photography. For the last few years, he had the idea to travel the state, take photos and compile the best pictures on a blog. Last spring, he took a picture of the Columbus Marina. That photo, one of the first he took in HDR, became the first post on his blog, mississippiinhdr.com. That was only the beginning.
Warren started the project after learning about HDR photography, a set of techniques used to capture a greater range of color in photos. He says the result produces more realistic-looking photos with vivid colors.
“If you take a photo with your phone or something like that, you’ll notice that you don’t … get a lot of detail in the photo,” he said. “Something might be too bright or another thing might be too dark, so you don’t see actually what your eye sees. HDR … captures most of the light that your eye sees, so when you look at the photo, it looks more realistic than a typical photo.”
To take photos in HDR, Warren sets his camera to the auto-bracketing setting and then takes three consecutive photos of something — one at a normal exposure, one with a darker exposure and one with a lighter exposure. Then the real work begins.
“Once I take … all three of those photos, I have a software that I use that stitches them all together that gets all the light, dark and normal in one photo,” he said.
He then works with the pictures in Lightroom and Photoshop until they look the way he wants.
So far, most of the photos on Warren’s blog have been from the Golden Triangle and south Mississippi, where he has family. Warren has not had as much time to travel as he would like. Still, he’s determined to find the time to get more photos from more parts of the state.
“Hopefully I’ll have at least a photo from every county by the end of the year,” he said. “That’s the goal anyway. I think I’ve covered about 15 counties so far out of 82, so I’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Though the photo of the Columbus Marina is his favorite picture, his favorite place to shoot so far has been the Delta.
“I made a last-minute decision to go there Saturday, and I left at (3 a.m.),” he said. “My wife thinks I’m crazy for doing that. I wanted to get to the river by sunrise, so I just spent the whole day traveling. It wasn’t a big part of the Delta, but I had a lot of fun that day. That’s kind of what I would like to do more of: just taking weekend trips and finding interesting things.”
Though the blog is still in its early days, it already has more than 65 pictures from 10 different counties. Warren’s project is teaching him more about the state. It also is a chance to show off Mississippi, he said.
“I always think it’s cool to showcase Mississippi in different ways because a lot of people outside of the state, especially outside the Southeast, don’t know a lot about Mississippi,” Warren said. “It’s just an opportunity to show Mississippi in a good light, and show state pride.”
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