As per popular demand, here are a few picture of me with two and a half weeks worth of facial hair. I have the impression that I might have created an illusion of actually having a massive beard, but, as you can see from the pictures, that is far from the truth. As you probably also notice, I’m not very comfortable in front of the camera, at least not when I have to take the pictures myself. Don’t I look all jolly and excited!?

Since I was going to force myself to take some portraits, I decided to try to take some high dynamic range, HDR, photos. It’s an interesting technique I’ve been sniffing at for some time, but I’ve never gotten around to try it until now. Done right, HDR can produce some stunning results. To create an HDR picture, you take several picture of the same scene with different exposure and magically (or “mathematically”, if you will) merge these pictures to create a greater dynamic range of luminance between the lightest and darkest areas in the resulting image.

My Canon 400D can’t take HDR images out of the box, and it only allows three picture to be taken using bracketing. This is all very limiting, and I have to use a plugin for Aperture to create the HDR image from the three RAW images shot by the 400D, but the result wasn’t too bad, considering this was my first go at HDR photography.

One thing is for sure, though. The beard has to go.