Wow! This is awesome – so beautiful – knowing you – you probably already went on the water slide – it looks sooo fun!

I am curious. How is it, a man like you, who travels the world, still find amazement and even interest in these fake American corporation non sense? I mean Disney? ‘cmon! Cool photo though!

Another cool shot, sounds like you are having fun,but we men never grow up we still like playing with our toys, ask your Mum its true

What the what?!?   Those slides look SICKO!!

Any chance you can say what setting you use to get these amazing pictures?

Disney’s ability to construct amazing things that can help build magical moments has always fascinated me.     Glad to see the lawyers haven’t gotten in the way of innovation on the new ship!

Love your photography, it’s inspired me to do HDR and am having a blast with it.  Looking forward to your Lightroom video tutorial…that may or may not be posted.  ;-)

Trey, did you mainly use the clarity slider in LR4 for yesterday’s image?  If you didn’t use HDR or Photomatix or Topaz, that’s the quickest way that I could think to get it looking close to that.

As I wrote yesterday, the issue is that the real meaning of HDR is misunderstood and abused.
 
A HDR file referes to files able to store luminance (cd/m^2) information like .exr and .hdr.
 
Real HDR files which store information of a real dynamic range scene cannot be enterely/correctly visualized on a conventional 8bit monitor (you will need fancy HDR monitors like the one produced by dolby labs), since the static contrast ratio of normal monitors are limited to about 8 stops.
 
The information of a HDR file needs to be transposed, translated or compressed
into a poorer format (from a contrast ratio point of view) like jpeg. Tiff and jpeg can only store
discrete information expressed in terms of gray tones (0 is black, 255 is white) and not physical information.
This process is known as tone-mapping.
Tone-mapping is exactly what a landscape-painter does. He transposes luminance values of a high dynamic range scene (the limit is his eye which can detect about 1:16000 contrast ratios or 16 stops)
into the canvas, which is a limited dynamic range support (1:128 corresponding to about 7 stops).
 
As a consequence it is not possible to derive with 100% certainty from a jpeg, if the shown scene has a low, middle or high dynamic range. This information is simply not available in the jpeg format.
 
The so called “HDR look” is simply decoupled from the real meaning of HDR.
 
You can photograph a scene with 4 stops (a normal DLSR captures about 9 stops, thus the histogram will be half-populated), and in post-processing set the white/black points in order to cover the entire histogram, boost contrasts, boost saturation, apply multiple times the clarity filter and you will end up with a fake HDR.
 
You can only guess if a scene as a dynamic range. A picture showing an interior/exterior scene
(e.g. a room with a window open on a courtyard at noon under a clear sky) is probably an high dynamic range scene.
 
Trey, I am sorry but I am disappointed about this last post. I guess that your website absorbs a great portion of the google queries related to the word “HDR”, thus it would be the perfect place to clarify this concept to your audience.
I am sure that you have a deep knowledge on this topic also from a scientific point of view. I saw you graduated in math, thus I am quite confident that you are not allergic to some physics.
 
So why are you playing with the widespread ignorance on this topic? Are you aiming only to increase the traffic to your G+ account?

Without trying to put words in Trey’s mouth, I’m almost sure it was the clarity slider that achieved that effect. If you watch the Adobe Lightoom 4 youtube main tutorial (I think it’s called New Features or something) it shows you on there how cranking up the clarity slider now can basically reproduce an HDR effect. But of course there are other ways to achieve that (Nik Color Efex Tonal Contrast filter)……

Awesome shot as always Trey!

If you don’t understand that Disney is REAL American culture, then your definition of culture is far too narrow. And anyway, as far as I’m aware, there are no naturally-occurring cruise ships in the world. Have a magical day!

Now I have to save up for the D800.  Where are all the people? are you on this ship alone?

 blah blah blah corporate blah blah blah

Trey ,it would be sour grapes if I won it here in Austraila  he! he!  Have a nice weekend.

Great shot, too bad you couldn’t manage to get it without any people in it but I know how difficult it can be to go anywhere on a ship carrying 5,000 people without there being someone around.  Other than that, great photo, it really captures the essence of what it feels like being on an open deck of a cruise ship at night.

1) Physics explains a lot but there’s a cut off. The field of physics doesn’t really deal with what you’re talking about. I’m sick of people saying “let me explain the physics to you” when they really mean “let me explain the technology to you”. Why are you’re playing with the widespread ignorance of the topic?

2) Trey has in the past acknowledged what HDR really is. However, he says, HDR has taken on a different definition, a colloquial one, describing a photographic style or look. If 6.999 billion people worldwide are using HDR colloquially then you are, in practice, wrong. 

Perhaps you work in a field where precise language pertaining to HDR is required: then I urge you to be a little flexible. You are mapping, scaling, the information to a jpg. All the light information is not lost. Calling a tonemapped HDR image an HDR image is not the wrongest thing in the world.

 I agree with you on both points. I appreaciate the fact you took your time to discuss this topic.

Anyway I think that it would not be a big effort for Trey to explain why this picture which has a “HDR-look” was obtained starting from a low-dynamic range scene.