Gadget’s Airstream Chronicles

Over the weekend I set up several HDR shots to work with.  I wasn’t sure what would be good or bad.  The shot to the left is another example of my experimentation with HDR.

High Dynamic Ratio Photography is growing in popularity.  I personally find it extremely interesting, and I understand how it can be used to create more interesting and sometimes accurate photos.

So, how does one take an HDR photo?  You don’t.  You take a series of photos, and then merge them together.  The photo to the left is composed of 3 different exposures.  One extremely low light photo, one properly exposed photo, and one extremely over exposed photo.

Once you have your 3, 5, 7, etc., exposures you pop them into something like Adobe Photoshop CS3 or Photomatix and merge the photos.  Once merged you still have to tone map the photo.

I have yet to find any in depth documents on the tone mapping process.  It seems to be a matter of artistic preference.  When I first open each of my HDRs I’m usually disappointed.  Only my recent shot of the courthouse worked out right on the first pass in Photoshop, no real changes in tone mapping (the photo is included in this post).  Others seem over blown, under exposed, etc.  That’s where the tone mapping comes in.

I’m willing to bet people who are great with HDR shots have some specific things they do while tone mapping.  I’d like to learn what those things are……

In the meantime, I’ll experiment and see where I can get these types of pictures to go.  I won’t concentrate too much on these though.  I think HDR works for certain types of pictures, but not all pictures.  So you won’t see this blog going all HDR all the time…..we’ll still talk about other stuff and present other pictures. 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 6:52 am and is filed under Digital Photography, Photo of the Day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.