Decaying Thermal Generating Plant
November 24, 2006 10:30 PM   Subscribe

Despite the occasional cheesy superimposed nude (nsfw), for the most part this photo series of images taken by Charles Bodi inside a decaying thermal generating station is quite nice; my personal favorite.
posted by jonson (22 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Yeah, that superimposed nude is pretty cheesy, alright... The series is cool, makes me wish I could go there myself. But the 3rd link ("my personal favorite") takes me to a Yahoo/Flickr log-in page. Wussupwidat?
posted by flapjax at midnite at 10:42 PM on November 24, 2006


Dang. I guess being logged in to Flickr on my end I'm able to get to larger shots of the images. Here's the page for the one I was linking to.

I wish there was a warning icon for Flickr users as to what pages are and aren't accessible to the outside world.
posted by jonson at 10:45 PM on November 24, 2006


Your personal favorite - I'd hit it. With a power hammer while listening to Einsturzende Neubauten.
posted by Balisong at 10:47 PM on November 24, 2006


Water on the floor in your personal favorite shot; not much maintenance it seems, so not much future for the facility despite all the proposals to bring it back on line.
posted by Cranberry at 10:49 PM on November 24, 2006


That's neat. Around here, they just turn amazing sights like that into strip malls.
posted by IronLizard at 11:00 PM on November 24, 2006


More info on the Hearn.
posted by The White Hat at 11:12 PM on November 24, 2006


Looks like H.R. Giger stuff to me. Particularly with the superimposed nudes.
posted by twjordan at 11:17 PM on November 24, 2006


Makes me think of Tetsuo the Iron Man but in color. Definitely see Giger there too.

This is to wires what that is to pipes.
posted by bobobox at 11:29 PM on November 24, 2006


Cool. The earth tones that keep popping up give the images a contrasting warmth.
posted by toma at 3:18 AM on November 25, 2006


I personally like this series better, as I just can't stand HDR for some reason. Other than its faddishness & flickr-ubiquity, of course.
posted by Devils Rancher at 6:20 AM on November 25, 2006


Oh man, don't get me started on HDR. I had a friend explain HDR to me, so I went through flickr looking at HDR stuff and found very few that I liked. I can't quite put my finger on what exactly it is, 'cause I like other processing that gets done. Something about the plasticness of the resulting images.
posted by Eekacat at 7:06 AM on November 25, 2006


So, why does clicking on your favorite link take me to a yahoo/flickr page and demand that I sign in?
posted by etaoin at 7:14 AM on November 25, 2006


etaoin - see my comment above.
posted by jonson at 9:54 AM on November 25, 2006


Oh man, don't get me started on HDR. I had a friend explain HDR to me, so I went through flickr looking at HDR stuff and found very few that I liked. I can't quite put my finger on what exactly it is, 'cause I like other processing that gets done. Something about the plasticness of the resulting images.

Just FYI, there is no HDR on Flickr, anywhere. There are the remains of HDR images compressed into LDR color space with various programs/methods, but you just can't display a true HDR image on your monitor. Your monitor cannot display the full dynamic range of color and contrast available in an HDR.

While the current methods of mashing HDRs down is pretty good, they have their own halo-y artifacts and color problems, which you see. But those problems are not with the high dynamic range image- but with the low dynamic range representation of it.

So, you're not sick of HDR, but how HDR looks when it's mashed down into a range of colors and values that's totally underrepresentative.
posted by fake at 10:13 AM on November 25, 2006


That, & I'm also sick of the faddishness, the fawning over it & the ubiquity on Flickr. There's a weird subculture surrounding it that I find off-putting.
posted by Devils Rancher at 10:19 AM on November 25, 2006


What's the deal with the superimposed nudes, anyway? They seem awfully ... random. Much as I like teh boobiez, I can't say they add to the aesthetics of the pictures.
posted by hattifattener at 10:52 AM on November 25, 2006


Just FYI, there is no HDR on Flickr, anywhere. There are the remains of HDR images compressed into LDR color space with various programs/methods, but you just can't display a true HDR image on your monitor. Your monitor cannot display the full dynamic range of color and contrast available in an HDR.

posted by fake at 11:13 AM MST on November 25


(heh, eponysterical)

So when they process them it's trial and error with the printer? That makes no sense. And, if they're publishing them on the internets, and they know it looks asstastic on a computer monitor, why do they do it? Then there's the whole crop of them (most to my eye) that are just simply way overblown. There are a very few that do look pretty nice. I think a lot has to do with the whole "if a little must be good, a LOT must be better" thought process.
posted by Eekacat at 3:57 PM on November 25, 2006


fake, I have a feeling that most of those HDR compositions would look just as awful on a fancy HDR display. Somewhat less grey and plasticine, but still awful.
posted by blasdelf at 11:10 PM on November 25, 2006


Eekacat, you don't print an HDR image as such. First you have to downsample it to a format that a printer can use, such as TIFF. This is the same as converting one to JPG. You throw away a lot of that dynamic range. A JPG or TIFF stores a lot less color/brightness info than an HDR.

HDR means High Dynamic Range. The purpose of an HDR is to capture more dynamic range - shadow to highlight- than an ordinary exposure. This means, for example, if you photograph a lightbulb, you have enough captured information that you can actually step down the exposure and see the filament glowing.

Current displays (with the exception of the one blasdelf links - i'll be using it in my graduate studies) do not display HDR. Your display has even less dynamic range, dark-to-light, than a photograph.

I totally agree with blasdelf that most of these images would suck on an HDR display. Because they are not HDR! They are JPG renderings from HDR.

I think the easiest way for you to "get" this completely is to download an HDR viewer and open a few HDR images to see the depth of information there. I tested software for a truly outstanding guy, Sean O'Malley, and he has some of my HDR images on his website. I won't say they're great photos, but the are good examples.
posted by fake at 11:30 PM on November 25, 2006


What would be really cool is short film clips of different compositions of the same HDR image — I've seen this with focus depth before, but never HDR. Do you know of any, fake?
posted by blasdelf at 1:04 AM on November 26, 2006


It's an idea I've been playing with - not so much different compositions but using exposure across the time axis...

When you view an image with the linked HDR viewer, it is possible to reveal/conceal different parts of the image in a movie-like fashion. I'm not doing it this way, but you could just capture directly from the viewer and get what you want. Because HDR is all about exposure- capturing every level of brightness in the scene, really any film scene that uses exposure (I know I've seen a few) to hide or reveal something would work as you suggest. So it's not new or HDR specific, but HDR definitely would be a great medium to play with, in that way.

I don't want to get into a lot of detail here (because a lot of these projects are up-and-coming), but if you want to talk more about it I'd be happy to get an email from you.
posted by fake at 1:52 AM on November 26, 2006


fake, I do know what HDR means, and I understand basically what it's about, but I'll be the first to admit I don't know a lot about the details of it. What I don't "get" about it, especially considering your comments here, is why people are doing so much of it using media that it doesn't work with, or rather in a way that it doesn't work. It seems like there are a lot of technical boundaries to overcome before it becomes useful in an ordinary sense. Some of the simple things that come to mind would be using HDR technology to take place of a gradient filter when you have a dark foreground and a bright sky in a landscape. I've seen some folks who have done this using different exposures in layers in photoshop. Yeah, not true HDR, but it does do the things I would find useful.
posted by Eekacat at 8:37 AM on November 26, 2006


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