So I’ve been wanting to play with HDR photography for a while now, and today seemed like the a great day to try, given the kind of eerie beauty of billows of smoke in the distance. For those of you who don’t know, HDR photography stands for High Dynamic Range. Basically, you take 3 similar images of the same subject (best done with very still elements and a tripod), and shoot each image at a different level of exposure. The first image below is -1 (underexposed or exposing for the highlights), the second is 0 (normal exposure), and the third is +1 (overexposed or exposing for the shadows). By doing this, you get three images of the same subject at different exposures. Click each image to enlarge.
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And using certain software and photoshop techniques, you can combine the exposure data from all three images to create a single image that has all of the data for the under, normal, and overexposed images. This gives it a higher dynamic range of exposure than a single image, and thus more information to fill out the shadows and highlights within the same image. With all this extra information combined into a single image, the photographer/photomanipulator can adjust various levels of contrast, brightness, saturation and other elements in order to produce an image that is much more striking and vibrant than would normally be captured by conventional means.
So here’s to my first attempt at HDR photography, and I can pretty safely say that I’m hooked on it, so you can expect some more images in the future. Until then, you can check out some other stunning examples of HDR photography.
