HDR Photography

image courtesy of stuck in customs

Take a close look at the photo above. Would you believe me if I said that this was taken by a photographer and not made in some 3D modeling program? It's true. This kind of photography is known as High Dynamic Range photography and what it makes it different than regular pictures can be somewhat inferred by it's name. The range of the lighting, the details including the shadows, is much more than one would get from an ordinary photograph.

The photo above is one of my all time favorite HDR photos. It's simply a surreal capture of Japan that really drags you into it with every detail, comparable to a immersive video game. You must want to know how to make some of your own now don't you? HDR is created using three separate photographs at 3 levels of varying exposure. Remember how we discussed that exposure controls how bright or dark the picture is, and is controlled by a few different elements on the camera?

One photograph is taken at the regular exposure, the brights aren't blowing out any detail, and the shadows arn't to harsh as to lose too much detail. The next photograph is taken, I believe, a third under exposed, for harsher shadows. The next photograph is taken a third over exposed. This can be done in a fast sequence if your camera supports a feature known as bracketing. It is imperative that the camera is steady and is framed the exact same way for each photo, so a tripod is preferred. Here's why:

There are various softwares that will then take these three photographs and combine them in a way that the details brought out and emphasized in the under and over exposed pictures are now visible and pronounced in the picture that is normal. One of the programs that will do this is the most recent version of Adobe Photoshop, and another off the top of my head is called photomatix. The style has become so popular in recent years that the new iPhone is also capable of doing this on it's own, and there are applications that allow for HDR Video as well.

HDR is somewhat of an art because generally the software allows you to control how pronounced the effect is. This means your photos can have a subtle surreal detail to them or look like a completely computer generated scene: the choice is yours. Alternatively you could simply ruin the photo.