HDR Photography

First let's answer the obvious question: what is HDR photography? HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. It has been a fact of life for photography from the beginning that many scenes we photograph have a range of brightness that will not fit on film. Now that the large majority of us are shooting with digital cameras we find that the brightness range of those scenes that will not fit on film will also not fit in a digital image.

Here are two photos taken at virtually the same instant. The one on the left was exposed to show detail in the brush and the wooden walkway on the left side. There is almost nothing visible in the sky and we miss the gorgeous colors of the sunset. However if we expose for those wonderful colors, as we did on the right, we loose all detail in the brush and trees on the land and half the photo is black.
Photographers, long ago, found a way to solve this problem; print the right image on the top of the paper and the left image on the bottom, but this only worked for darkroom folks. These darkroom artists created the first HDR images since they were able to create an image with detail that could not have been done with one exposure alone. For those of you familiar with darkroom methods; even dodging and burning will not recover detail that's not in the negative. Filter manufactures came to the rescue of photographers without darkrooms by creating graduated neutral density filters. The filter is half dark and half clear. Put it on your lens with the dark half on top and presto, the sky is correctly exposed and so is the land. Another however here, this only works when the dividing line between dark areas and bright areas is reasonably close to a straight line across the image.

With digital images we can combine the two just like the darkroom people did years ago. Now we electronically place the right image on top of the left image and erase the dark bottom to let the detailed land show through. This is not too difficult for even those without long experience in photo editing.

What becomes difficult is when the too light and the too dark areas are small irregular areas spread all over the image or when the brightness range is great enough that using three or four or five exposures is required to give you the results you want. This time it was software publishers riding to the rescue. You can now assemble many exposures into one with software you may already have and with programs you can download for free on the Internet. Photoshop and Photoshop Elements will do it. Photomatix is a very popular program that is just for HDR creating. On the Internet search for "free HDR software" and you'll get lots of hits. Check reviews before downloading to see if it's what you want.

The photo to the right was created by Photomatix from nine separate images including the two above (it was cropped slightly). HDR software allows you to create very realistic images, and as you see here, images that stretch reality to the breaking point. Some people love images done this way and others say things I wouldn't publish here. I'm in the group that like real and unreal. I'm lovin' what I get from Photomatix, but remember there are lots of free programs out there and even programs like Photomatix offer a free download to try.

On the even easier side, some newer model cameras have a built in HDR feature. You press the button it takes two shots, combines them, and presents you with the finished product.