MD Turner Photography Blog

You know you love what you do for a living when it’s also what you choose to do on your day off! This is what I did with my day off the other day.

So, I’ve seen a lot of buzz on Twitter lately about high dynamic range (HDR) photography from some of the photographers I follow, namely @BorrowLenses, borrowlenses.com; @ScottBourne, photofocus.com; and of course @TreyRatcliff, stuckincustoms.com, who appears to be the Zen master of HDR. I’m hoping to buy Trey’s new book, A World in HDR because his work is so phenomenal. Anyway, After seeing a lot of great work from these awesome photographers, I decided to give HDR a shot. I was very intrigued from the first time I heard about HDR as it potentially solves a common photography problem; the dynamic range of the scene exceeding the dynamic range of the camera, or film.

The idea behind HDR photography is to combine multiple exposures from the the same scene to create greater dynamic range than your camera can capture. Digital cameras and film alike both have a finite dynamic range, or total range between black and white. Inconveniently, the dynamic range of all cameras is narrower than that of the human eye, making it impossible to capture the scene as you see it with one picture. You typically have to choose between shooting the scene bright enough to get detail in your shadows, which will overexpose your highlights, or shooting the scene dark enough to get detail in your highlights, thereby sacrificing detail in the shadows. HDR enables you to achieve detail in both the shadows and the highlights by shooting the same scene at multiple exposure values and then merging them into one image using specialized software.

You might recognize this fountain. Its at the heart of Tranquility Park in downtown Houston.

Here is the finished product, what do you think?

Here are the original images that the HDR is composed of. The first image is the baseline image, with the the most balanced exposure that I could find. You can see that the sky and the water are still blown out, and there’s not very much detail in the shadows. I shot it using our Canon EOS 5D mkII camera and our Canon EF 24-70 F/2,8L lens. Setting were ISO 100, F8, 1/60, and I was zoomed to 50mm. I was at the park about 1PM, which is some of the harshest light all day. I had some light clouds diffusing the sun a bit, though.

This is the second image I shot. I used the auto exposure bracketing feature on my 5D2 to speed the shutter by a full stop from the first picture, thereby darkening the picture by one stop. You can see that there is very little detail in the shadows, but there is more detail in the brighter areas of the image, like the sky and water. All setting the same except shutter 1/125.

For the third image, I used the auto exposure bracketing feature to slow the shutter by a full stop to overexpose the image one stop over the first image. Notice that the sky and much of the water is completely blown out, but there is lots of detail in the shadows. All settings the same except the shutter moves to 1/30.

After importing the images onto my computer, I used Photomatix Pro to merge them into the HDR, and then did some other minor edits in Photoshop. I’ve only just begun to work withPhotomatix Pro, so I’m still coming to understand the nuances of the tone mapping controls which determine the final look of the image, but I found the controls to be very intuitive and the entire process to be very easy to navigate. I didn’t have to read any tutorials at all to navigate the software and walk through the HDR process.

One other thing I should probably mention is that you’ll want your tripod with you if you decide to dabble in HDR. Since you’re merging the images together its critical that they be completely identical except for the difference in exposure, and its all but impossible to pull that off handheld.