Result of some chronic wandering, here are a few of the street scenes that have made me reach for the camera recently... My favourite is the colorful mailbox wall, located on Granville Island at the entrance of our only floating houses community.

Chose promise, chose due. I announced an article that would relate bracketing for High Dynamic Range photography to quantum physics and here it is. Am I delivering or am I delivering?

Now before I lose most of my readers, I should state the obvious: I am not a quantum geek by any means. Quantum physics is a topic that has always fascinated me but I can’t say that I am particularly knowledgeable about it. I do my share of reading and thinking, that’s all.

So how do we define quantum physics? Quantum mechanics (QM) is a science dealing with the behaviour of matter and energy on the atomic and sub-atomic scales. It is a relatively recent field still being actively studied and defined, but it offers solutions to the shortcomings of Newtonian mechanics.

QM is paved with romantic notions such as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, wavefunction collapse, decoherence, entanglement, the multiverse and Schrödinger’s Cat – needless to say I barely understand that stuff.

But QM is so radically different from the Newtonian approach that it has sparked much interest, and debate. It is cutting edge, and as such, generates all kinds of reactions. Some of the principles of QM are quite difficult to even imagine, like the presence of an observer actually affecting the location and state of an object. Others like quantum computers and teleportation seem to be pulled out of a SCI-FI hat but they might in fact hit the shelves sooner than we think.

Like most revolutionary scientific ideas, QM has also triggered an entire parallel field of pseudo-science, or Quantum Mysticism. Of course, science and philosophy have never coexisted too easily, and they still don’t. But mankind has historically needed reasons to believe and ways to rationalize the absurdity of existence, and QM does just that, and it does it well. Movies like « The Secret » and « What tнē #$*! Ďө ωΣ (k)πow!? » prove that the quantum theory has great potential in becoming a bridge between science and philosophy. And a money maker.

The bottom line is this: nobody knows for sure. It’s all too new. It’s all too weird. It’s all too raw. It is being shaped, and carved, and tamed out of chaos. Someday, quantum mechanics will probably be as boring as calculus. For now it’s a wild playground, an unexplored jungle in which many theories will die before roads are cut through it and people actually visit.

And this leads me back to HDR. I hope that by now you can see my point about the similarities. Cutting edge. Debate. Mysticism vs technicality. And my favourite, the observer’s determining role in a situation.

There’s conventional photography in which a single composition can only be rendered right by a single correct exposure, as metered by the camera and composed by a series of equivalent combinations of f-stop and speeds. The light is a constant, so is the scene, and there are no variables to be introduced by the photographer. From a theoretical point of view, any given photographer with the same camera, location, framing and time of day should render the same exact image.

And then there is High Dynamic Range photography where anything goes. The photographer – or the observer – actually influences the outcome by just being there. The image produced after development will render a scene that could only be observed from within, and suddenly reality becomes a variable.

I know, I’m pushing my luck with this comparison, but I kind of like it. So I’ll go a step further and define a whole new field for mankind to play with: Quantum Photography - the photography of possibilities, where the photographer’s presence directly affects the nature of the scene. I hope to get rich with this. Watch for the Quantum Photography t-shirts and coffee mugs, coming soon to a store near you…

The things I’ll do for science... So here’s my latest HDR experiment: it’s a triple bracketed exposure of the nine o’clock gun firing at night, in which the first (correct) exposure was the actual firing shot. Now, while I blinked, was the cannon still there?

HDR is becoming trendy. Talking about it is cool. Doing it is audacious. Commenting on it is tricky. But make no mistake about it: HDR is not primarily a photography technique, it’s a traffic magnet. Read here « web and blog traffic » (even though I did also cause quite a bit of it when I had to setup my tripod in the middle of a street for a bracketed exposure.) So I will turn the power on, crank up the amps, magnetize my keyboard and see if I can get my share of traffic. This is all very formal business. The blogosphere might be a jungle but I am no monkey.

This being said, HDR, which stands for High Dynamic Range, could as well have been called CAT, or Confusing Ambiguous Topic. It’s one of those areas where a highly technical term is adapted and used by the common of mortals for trivial pursuits, just like when the Coriolis Effect notion gets distorted by an obnoxious geek and turned into a blog name, or when people start making their own weather forecast by noting how high their dog lifts his leg on the side of a lamppost, without any respect for the actual science of meteorology and the mastery of gambling it implies.

In essence, HDR is a concept that applies to areas way beyond my understanding and that are only studied in the original version of the 10th Photographer’s Guide to the Galaxy written by F. Stop. It would take years to even survey all the documentation available out there on the subject, and centuries to understand it. But understanding it doesn’t really help one that much because it is all highly subjective and the only practical skill needed in the HDR arena is the ability to turn a cold shoulder to nasty criticisms and to only reply when forced to do so by the unfair use of family triggers, as did Zidane on the field with his head.

Basically, as far as typical computer users are concerned, true HDR is an illusion. Our displays and most common applications aren’t designed to handle it. It’s a bit like me and cooking: I can talk about it all I want, when the time comes to boil the water and read the recipe, I’ve already given up and settled for a sandwich - I’m just not designed for it. In addition, common HDR is not even an original photography concept. It was borrowed from very advanced computer graphic design and film techniques and only retains in its photographic version the price tag (you can’t buy it at Future Shop), the glamour (almost as good as wearing original Vancouver-made Dayton boots like Johnny Depp’s), the complexity (even my quite powerful computer gives me time to go think about cooking and settling for a sandwich while processing an HDR image), and the stunning results, as all my fans know too well.

And therein lays the rub. No, not with my fans, I actually don’t have any (!) and I was just trying to keep my keywords consistent and since I started talking about the movie world... Anyway, the rub is that the results are stunning. You see, the fact that HDR photography normally implies hard work on the field followed by even harder work on the computer never seems to matter much. To the casual witness who pretends to be a photographer and knows it all, it’s too nice so it must be fake. To the seasoned pro, prehistoric monument of his profession with unchanged frozen habits and a killer routine, it is too new and daring and it breaks the long established rules that have brought him into the spotlight, hence it is cheating.

There only seems to be a narrow range of all the photographers who actually dare venture into the HDR realm and experiment with its creativity, remembering that photography is a form of art and as such, it will never be able to please everyone, nor should it ever want to.

And finally, I’d like to remind my esteemed readers, their family, heirs and legal guardians that even when provided by the utmost authority in the field, the HDR photography that is seen on the web, isn’t. It isn’t HDR photography, that is, not any more. The very act of posting a photo on the web as a common JPEG means reducing its dynamic and color range from the suprafabulousistic palette HDR was granting it to a cheapocrappy compromise version our senses and browser can interact safely with. And we still go « Oh! » and « Wow! »

So we should probably rename the technique WHDR, for Was High Dynamic Range, or my favourite and completely reworded DBIOA, Don’t Bitch It’s Only Art.

But the time has come for me to get a little more technicallistic. I will now attempt to explain HDR photography in the simplest terms, with my hands tied up behind my back in a stray jacket and hanging by my feet over the computer. I hope the rope can carry my weight because that touchpad looks like a rather small and hard landing strip. In any case I have lowered my keyboard’s repeat rate - in case I fail and fall.

Statement number one: even a modern camera can only record a limited dynamic range - in other words when we look at a very high contrast scene like a backlit saucisson on a picnic cloth somewhere near a lavender field in Provence (that’s only a random example), our eyes can adjust and show us the entire tonal range. The camera, however (and despite what the salesman said back at Future Shop) can only do its best and average the scene. It will have to blow the highlights, the shadows, or both. We’ll take a break here, so that you can digest this staggering fact. If you don’t know what it all means, just pretend, it will be explained later.

Statement number two: the first statement was too complicated for my own good and I’ve lost my way. I think I meant to say that HDR achieves a higher dynamic range by blending multiple exposures together and improving the tonal range. So in fact HDR was born to compensate for current camera hardware flaws and to render pictures that are closer to reality.

Oh wait a minute! What is reality? Old-timers used to say it was black & white. Dogs still do. Then photographers switched to color and began swearing only by film to represent reality. Then came the digital era and a new level of sensor-based reality recording was invented. And now there’s HDR as a new reality level. But the world as seen by a bee is as real as the one HDR shows us. Radio telescopes show us the limits of our universe and that’s all real. Auras and ghostly manifestations are probably real too. And so is the Matrix. So who’s to say what reality is and how we should render it? I prefer to think of HDR and conventional photography, as well as nuclear science, painting, writing and domestic disputes as different forms of reality representation.

In the end, HDR photography is like medicine, politics, storytelling and changing diapers: not an exact science but certainly an art.

• Note 1: yes, you read me right. Medicine is not a science, merely an art.

• Note 2: as a matter of fact, politics is the only art I know that systematically displeases the entire public and only serves the artist himself.

Further reading: disappointed by my sarcasm? Take no offense; I wrote this post after reading one too many heated exchange about HDR on a forum. But I do love HDR as a creative tool and use it often; I just think it should be addressed with a grain of salt. Ultimately, it’s not the photographer’s camera, nor his lens, nor his post-processing work that make the image; it’s all of the above. But most of all, it’s the photographer himself.

Here is a list of further (and more serious) references on the subject...

• HDR Tutorial (using Photomatix)
• Timothy Farrar’s FFDD5 set of actions for HDR in Photoshop
• A good HDR discussion also proving my point about traffic
• A comparison between the Photomatix and Photoshop HDR approaches

Stay tuned! An upcoming article will attempt to illustrate High Dynamic Range photography with the help of graphical examples and will also discuss the similarities between HDR and quantum physics...

Vancouver’s unique Tourism Challenge is now well under way. Two weeks to go ‘til closing time. I have enough stamps already but will probably collect a few more along the way. Of course this year wasn’t the crazy race last year was, but the circumstances were different, too.

For those wondering what on Earth I’m talking about, the Tourism Challenge is an exceptional initiative of the Vancouver Attractions Group, Tourism Vancouver and the Vancouver Hotel General Managers Association. In its seventh year, the program aims at giving tourism industry workers an opportunity to familiarize themselves with our area’s fantastic attractions and hotels.

The goal is a workforce that is better informed and more motivated to talk about what we have to offer to our visitors. With the 2010 Winter Olympic Games just around the corner, Vancouver is going to find itself in the spotlight long before the event, and hopefully long after it is over. The tourism industry has everything to gain from a well oiled machine and efficient networking so that visitors can be efficiently informed and directed from a key location to another by friendly and enthusiastic staff.

In comes the Tourism Challenge. A group of 60 tourism industry partners have designed special rates and free admission parameters for the Challenge and a special passport containing all the details is issued in late April to all the participants. They then have 6 weeks to visit, along with a guest, as many attractions as possible, receiving a stamp or more for each successful visit. Most attractions are free, superb hotel rooms are offered at amazingly low rates, one only has trouble deciding where to go first.

Finally, in early June, passports are collected and stamps counted. 15 stamps is the minimum required to see a Tourism Challenge Pass issued. Prizes are also drawn among the participants and they get bigger in stages, at 25 and 35 stamps. But the pass itself is what really makes the program shine. It entitles its bearer to free admission to most attractions for the rest of the year, for two people. Period.

We now have a happy tourism workforce (most of it, anyway ) that will continue to visit the Greater Vancouver hot-spots year-round and stay up-to-date on the latest events, promotions and offers. Very few people normally take the time to visit their own city’s museums and tourist attractions, partly because of the cost, partly because these are things we do when we are tourists ourselves, not at home in our daily routine. But the Tourism Challenge manages to draw its people out and remind them that indeed, they can have fun at home on their own turf. And more importantly, they will also tell others about it, with a smile.

Kudos to the three organizations behind the idea. I am thrilled to be part of the program and excited to get a chance to return the ball and promote our fantastic attractions and hotels.

Among my favourite participating attractions on which I have blogged or taken pictures from in the past are Grouse Mountain, the Capilano Suspension Bridge, the Vancouver Aquarium, Harbour Cruises, the Vancouver Lookout, Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, Imax at Canada Place, the VanDusen Botanical Garden, The Vancouver Maritime Museum, the Museum of Anthropology, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Sewell’s Marina, False Creek Ferries, Landsea Tours and West Coast Sightseeing, the Tourism vancouver Info Center, and more…

A couple of days ago, sick as a dog but unable to rest, I made the ridiculous decision to bike (because I didn’t have the energy to walk that far) over to Stanley Park and re-shoot the Nine O’clock Gun firing. After dragging myself there and still arriving too early, I stopped by the Lady in the Wetsuit for a few pictures then biked around the point to the gun, where I setup my tripod on the rocks and started playing with the light.

After a few minutes, I glanced at the bike to make sure it was still there and then mentally checked the rest of my gear. Tripod: in front of me. Camera: on the tripod. Brain: probably left at home next to the Tylenol. Camera backpack: ... Camera backpack? My next thought was worded out via a word ending with the same letter as the suddenly missing backpack, which I realized I had dropped on a bench behind me at my prior stop to grab the neutral density filter - and had left it there.

I instantly gave up on the upcoming blast, hopped on the Seawall and furiously biked back towards the scene of the crime, camera hanging around my neck and fully extended tripod under an arm. I got there no more than 15 minutes after leaving. The bench was empty, desert. My dear Lowepro bag was gone, along with a cheap lens, 1 GB in memory cards, a spare battery, the charger, two polarizing filters, various lens cleaning accessories, a USB cord, a box of Tic-Tacs, and my pride.

Some bastard made a good deal. I should’ve stayed in bed.

Every year, towards the end of Spring, they sail back to Vancouver like a school of gigantic migrating steel monsters responding to some secret calling. They will come and go all summer, pouring as many as 8000 passengers into downtown a day, three of them docked at Canada Place and two more over at Ballantyne Pier. They are massive, elegant, imposing, disruptive, controversial. They are the cruise ships.

When even the VanDusen Botanical Garden’s flowers are still not blooming, one is left with a single alternative: orchids at the Bloedel Conservatory. Here they are, in single tones and shades of grey to match the weather...