dominic eidson

Fledgeling Photographer: High Dynamic Range Photography

Posted by Dominic Sun, 06 Jan 2008 21:35:00 GMT

This last week, while visiting Rebecca’s relatives in Georgia, I experimented with a photographic concept called HDR photography

Simply put, cameras don’t have quite the color/luminance range that our eyes have. So when you’re photographing a scene which goes from intense brightness to intense darkness all in the same scene - you either have to sacrifice the dark in order to see the light part correctly - or sacrifice the light part in order to see the dark part correctly.

HDR photography attempts to deal with this issue bracketing several exposures +- some amount of F-stop, and then blending the three-or-more images together to create the finished product.

The downside to this technique is that there is a fair amount of post-processing required. This makes HDR photography ill suited for photojournalism, etc - places where the desired outcome includes no post-processing.

It was suggested during my HDR research that HDR photography was more like capturing a memory, since it closer approximates how we remember a scene, and after some playing around, I am tempted to agree with this - there are certainly ways to get a good shot in-camera without all the fancy tricks, but then again - sometimes you want to capture a mood that is hard/impossible to light.