Mike Hardisty - tophdr.com

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About Me

Basic Information

Gender: Male
About me: Hi! I’m Mike Hardisty. It looks like you’ve seen some of my images around the web and thought you should take a closer look because you liked what you saw. No! Did I get it wrong? Stay anyway. What’s the harm and you might like what you see?

I create images. An unusual word to use with photography, create. But it’s true. It’s very rare that I post an image S.O.O.C. (straight out of camera). I’m a firm believer in using software like Photoshop on my original image to transform it into my vision, although nowadays it’s PhotoPlus X5 from Serif Software that I use. Photoshop was just getting too expensive to justify the annual cost of upgrading “Oh no, another Photochopper” I hear you say, “Get me out of here”.

But wait. Think about it. Why should I let the software geeks and ultimately the processor of my camera dictate what the final image will look like? It’s my photograph, my vision. For this reason it’s very rare that I take single exposures. I nearly always create multiple exposures. With a tripod it’s usually brackets of five (-2 to +2) in 1 Ev steps. Handheld, I use the same range but use three brackets instead. These are blended together on my computer, normally by HDR, but sometimes I use manual stitching; to create what I think is the perfect exposure. That’s right; I’m a practitioner of the black art of HDR. Remember though, it’s my vision.

Right from the start I learned how to shoot in manual, TV, AV, you know all those fun modes. Why let a machine make the decisions, that’s how SKYNET started and we all know how that ended. I like using creative techniques, HDR, Long Exposure, Exposure Fusion, Panoramas, and Light Painting.