HDRLabs has always been a great place of collaboration, so many people are running HDR-related projects here:

• Mark Mehl with Picturenaut,
• Steve Chapman with the Open Camera Controller,
• Thomas Mansencal and many others pushing Smart IBL,
• Professor Kirt Witte with the ultimate HDRI-FAQ,
• and all the forum members with their vivid discussions.

It's a nice little community of HDR nuts, that makes this place into what it is. Open, professional, cutting edge.

In hindsight, having only myself bring you the news on this blog sounds rather silly. I'm always late and too often allow things to fall through the cracks. So, today the open spirit will extend to this news blog as well: it will be a shared space for multiple news reporters.

Say hello to Michael James

Michael James is a professional real-estate photographer in Florida, his clients are realtors, builders and architects. Michael was very quick to adopt HDR into his regular workflow, building up an impressive portfolio, and he became a strong HDR advocate by sharing his thoughts on www.hdriblog.com. He's shot more than 700 properties in the last 4 years, delivering about twenty tonemapped images each. That’s a track record of well over 14,000 HDR images captured and tonemapped for commercial use.

Michael, say hello to the world

I want to thank Christian for inviting me to play in his sand box here at HDR Labs. He and I never discussed the following, but I'll say it now. His book The HDRI Handbook had an instrumental role in my HDR workflow. Although I've adopted some new apps and workflows over the past couple of years, many of the concepts and techniques taught in his book spilled over into my pipeline.

I look forward to sharing news, tid bits and tips and tricks about HDR here on HDR Labs in the months and years to come.