I hate doing laundry in apartments. There always seems to be an issue with quarters, never having any, finding a place to get them, and finally when you have them, you never have enough! After thinking about all the reasons I hate doing laundry in apartments, I came to one pro: At least I am seeing quarters in mass quantities on laundry day!
Ever since I was a kid I loved quarters. It has something to do with the arcade and the infinite possibilities of the quarter. I could go from being Donatello of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to a gunship in 1942, to a yellow ball eating machine in Pac-Man. I could be all of those things with a pocket full of quarters. This generation of kids will never value the quarter like they should.
These days the quarter excites me in new ways. Every year the mint is putting out new quarters. At the local car wash last week I got 10 dollars worth of quarters for laundry and found National Park quarters! Yosemite, I left a piece my heart there, Glacier, Hot Springs, and Gettysburg. I had no idea the mint was putting out National Park quarters for their “America The Beautiful Series”. These quarters are very good looking and truly catch your attention when you get change at the cashier. For that reason, I had to photograph them before the laundry machines consumed them. I gave them the old Graphic Novel Treatment and boy do they look handsome!
I had a severe problem when I finished photographing these quarters. It seems digital cameras do not like silver! I had tons of chromatic abberations, you know that cyan and magenta offset crap that you get on the edges of objects in your images. Along with the pesky chromatic abberations, I found tons of color noise. To achieve silver, the camera recorded every color in the spectrum. I had red noise, yellow noise, cyan noise, blue noise, green noise, and magenta noise where I should have had grey, white or black. I am sure the HDR tonemapping process didn’t help too much either. I was almost on the verge of dumping all of the pictures, but then as always, I solved the problem the EverydayHDR way. I will be sure to share all of these secrets in my E-Book. If you don’t want to wait another 3 months or so, just tune in to the video tutorial this Friday!
For Blake, it's all about the art and process synergy. He dives deep into complex topics and makes them easy to understand through his outside-the-box thinking so that you can use these tricks in your workflow today!
