Playing with HDR photography

Light sources are a bit of a difficulty for amateur photographers like me. If there’s a bright light source in shot shadows tend to fade into complete blackness. If, however, I remember to meter so that the shadows are OK, any bright light sources can ruin the photo. The thing is, though, the human eye is capable of seeing this wide range of brightnesses, and it would be rather nice to be able to take photos that include all that detail.

HDR, or High Dynamic Range, photography aims to reproduce the range of lighting we see in the real world by combining images taken with different exposures. The easiest way (and purists would say the only way) to do this is if your camera supports Automatic Exposure Bracketing (AEB). AEB takes several photos in succession with different exposures. So, on my camera, I set the AEB to 2 stops, and then I get three photos – one that looks underexposed, one normal, and one overexposed. You can make good use of this for more than creating HDR images, but that’s what I use it for the most.

Right, so once you’ve got your three photos, what do you do with them?  You need to somehow convert your images to one HDR image, and by far the best program I’ve found to do this is Photomatix. There’s a decent tutorial here, so I won’t run through exactly how to use the program, but the upshot is that your multiple images are merged into an HDR image. Whilst that’s interesting to explore, your monitor is still not capable of showing it off to full effect, so it has to be “tonemapped” for display. This, for me, is where the magical HDR look comes into play.

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The look is pretty distintive, and hard to describe, so I’ll just show it to you. This is a photo of the Scotland Well, taken on a winter’s evening and processed through Photomatix. Notice how the shadowed areas under the roof are still visible, but how at the same time the whole image has a sort of moody look.

I find that HDR works best with architecture, perhaps because there are usually plenty of highlights and shadows to be found, but I’ve seen some great examples of HDR images of cars and scenery. My own attempts at scenery had been a bit of a failure because of movement in trees causing problems when the images are combined, but I hope to find a way around that!

So, have you played with HDR? Got any shots you want to show off? Or have you got any tips you want to share? Have you managed to get around background movement in scenery? Share your experience in the comments!

(and if you’re interested, you can see some of my HDR photos here)

Tags: Dynamic, HDR, High, Photography, Range

Category: Technique & Tips