A Rare View: C-5A Galaxy T-tail {HDR Photography}
It's always awesome to bring beauty and our experiences to others who are unable to experience it themselves. Last week, we had the opportunity to take an incredible HDR shot from the t-tail of the C-5A Galaxy over at the Air Mobility Command Museum. This is something that not many people really get to see for themselves. The t-tail of the C-5 is about 60ft in the air and to get to the hatch, you must climb a ladder in a very tight space. Once at the top, if you want to actually walk out onto the t-tail you have to wear a harness to safely walk out there. There is a lot of people who wouldn't be overly thrilled with the idea of walking out there, but C-5 crew chiefs do this fairly often. As you can see from the photo below, it's an incredible view. From the AMC Museum you can see the airfield at Dover AFB as well as all the planes that are outside in the museum compound.
I mentioned previously that this image is an HDR. This simply means that the photo has a high dynamic range. Furthermore, it also means that this photo was achieved by taking more than one photograph and merging them together in post. This particular photo is actually 3 images that were taken at different exposures and merged together using Photoshop. We don't typically do many HDRs, but we're trying to decide where and how we like to use them. The reason for the three images at different exposures is really to make the image more crisp, clear and more precise. As you can see in the image above, everything looks 3D instead of it looking like a normal photograph. This is mostly due to HDR.
In the future, you may see more HDR images from us. We're still playing around with it and deciding if we like using this or not. There are times when it looks really great, and other times it's just too much. It depends on the subject matter.
If you want to learn more about HDR imaging you can check out this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-dynamic-range_imaging