Joe Hamilton Photography: HDR Portraits

Photographed my youngest brother Jordan doing what he loves most, playing the guitar. Jordan has been playing guitar since he was around 11 and he has definitely acquired his own style of playing. Whether it be on acoustic or electric Jordan surely knows his way around a guitar.
Cruised over to his house to try and get some worthy HDR images of him in his own environment. For those of you who have never heard of HDR, do a quick Google search on it and you will get plenty of info on it. Numerous folks have lots of info on the whole process. In a nut shell, HDR blends numerous exposures into one final image. Reason for doing this is because it gives you a very large tonal range and it looks very cool. Some love it and some hate, but, you can't win them all can you. This is just a tool and should not be used to excess.
HDR is typically best used for landscapes or objects that are not moving. Because we are taking more than one image anything that does move will give off a ghostly appearance and not look right. This can be corrected in Photo Shop, but, you might as well get the shot right the first time.
From my past experience and images I have seen online, HDR is not a friend to skin tones. Finding ways around the skin tone problem is what I am after.
Below are a few examples of what my final results were from the shoot. The color images actually didn't look half bad, but, in the end I decided to apply an action to get this sepia look. Jordan did an awesome job of staying completely still for the 3 exposures for each of the images. I had a few where you could see his hand or head moving to much so they were deleted. Had Jordan just hold his breath for these 3 images and try to not move at all. His room had very little ambient light coming in through the window so the exposures were going to be quite slow. Only other tool that was used was the "Transform" tool to "Skew" the walls and posters to get them all nice and straight.
For anyone that has any questions on HDR or photography please send me an email, I am here to help.