HDR

The worst thing about photography is the fact that you never capture exactly what you see. There is such a diversity of colours and brightness levels that a camera simply cannot capture. Compromises have to be made for a satisfactory picture to be produced, and sometimes it’s hard to come to a happy medium.

Days with bright sunlight often tend to blow out the sky out, leaving it completely white. If you attempt to capture some of the sky the way it actually looks, with its cloud formations and deep blue colour, then you’re likely to underexpose the subject of the photo. The greater the difference between the brightest colour and the darkest, the harder it is to come to a happy compromise. This difference is called the dynamic range of a photo.

The dynamic range that can be captured in a photo depends on the camera sensor and the file type. Different cameras obviously have different sensors, the better sensors being capable of capturing a greater dynamic range than other sensors. The file type is probably the more important of the two. Cameras can usually save in JPEG or raw. Shooting in JPEG limits the amount of information stored in a photo, and basically puts the camera in control of what is being saved. This severely limits the potential of photos when post processing, and hence limits the higher dynamic range that could be achieved.

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, and this type of photography produces exactly that: A photo that has a High Dynamic Range. This is done with a combination of photos taken at different Exposure Values in order to piece together something that more accurately represents what the human eye sees, something that would otherwise be impossible with one photo.

I had my first attempt of this yesterday, and here are my results:

Comparing a photo with a HDR to one without, a standard photo, is like comparing the same piece of music being played straight, note for note, without variation in volume, without accentuating important parts and without playing with the physical nature of the instrument itself. It’s like listening to an important piece of writing being read by a politician, or a poet.