hdr photography

[mathjak107]

anyone try hdr high dynamic range photography?

tried it yesterday for the first time, simply amazing is the only thing i can say.

you know how when you have a bright scene and a dark scene together you normally have to either blow out the highlights to get detail in the shadows or the reverse?

well using hdr you simply take a bracket of 3 shots, 2 steps above your regular shot and 2 steps below. now you have 3 exposures of the same scene

now using photomatix software i simply had it re-map the 3 exposures into 1 image using the best exposures of all 3. it was incredible how it did it.

far beyond what any of my filters could ever do. its definatly worth playing with.
HDR photo software & plugin - Tone Mapping, Exposure Blending & HDR Imaging for photography

[ladelfina]

Some of the examples are quite lovely.. but also weird and unnatural.. If conventional lenses/apertures can't get the whole range of what we can see.. neither can our eyes really capture it all. Quite a few look odd to me because they go too far in the other direction: too much information.. too much light... too much something!

When used in moderation, though, they do arrive close to "photographic" perfection.. I'm thinking of the basilica interior which is pretty close to what a person would see, yet is hard to capture with conventional photography (bottom photo here):
Photomatix User Gallery - Ron Harmeyer

Some of the "unnatural" examples are pleasant in a painterly way.. but others look "bad" to me.. just "wrong" somehow! Maybe it's just me.. I wonder what other people think.

[mathjak107]

our eyes geatly exceed what the camera sensors can see our eyes can see 50,000:1 in dynamic range , a camera sensor 300:1 . everything in photography is a trade off. either the nice white clouds are blown out and pure detailess white or the darker objects on the ground are to dark and lost. thats why best photography is at sunrise or sunset. depending on the processing after the merge thats what gives that artificial look. the merging of 3 exposures byitself leave a very natural picture, just like any other. only thing you notice is you can see in the shadows and sky and clouds look great all at the same time. those effects in those pictures was just regular manipulation in photoshop.. the pictures you posted sre pushed pretty far with color booster as those reds pop out.

[mathjak107]

Heres a pic a just did , just combined 3 exposures with no other enhancements. origionally nothing on left side under bridge was visable in the origional exposure . if i tried to make it visible then the snow blew out on the right side turning featurless vanilla white and was useless.. its just a test shot, nothing special but i wanted something that easily exceeded the cameras range i could play with .


the first picture is the combined. the other 3 the origionals

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Picasa Web Albums - MATTY - HDR PICS

[UncleHoney]

Here's a guy that carries HDR to the extreme.

Stuck In Customs

[calmloki]

Originally Posted by mathjak107

Heres a pic a just did , just combined 3 exposures with no other enhancements. origionally nothing on left side under bridge was visable in the origional exposure . if i tried to make it visible then the snow blew out on the right side turning featurless vanilla white and was useless.. its just a test shot, nothing special but i wanted something that easily exceeded the cameras range i could play with .


the first picture is the combined. the other 3 the origionals

.

Picasa Web Albums - MATTY - HDR PICS

Interesting certainly - your picture set gives more information and is less jarring than Ron Harmeyer's - His made me think "everything old is new again! Looked like they were hand tinted pictures:

[mathjak107]

well i could pump them up with all those effects in photoshop but that wasnt the purpose right now. just started shooting hdr and still learning to merge the images. its real easy with the software. just clicking on merge with defaults all as is does a pretty good job

[RonBoyd]

Originally Posted by mathjak107

well i could pump them up with all those effects in photoshop

Yes, one could "pump them up" with PS, however as with all the other Photoshop tools, one needn't. I use Photoshop CS3 Ultimate and use the HDR feature rarely. Nevertheless, when it is needed to "process" the image properly, there is nothing like it.

On the other hand, Ben Long uses it quite regularly. Where is Ben? It was particularly effective in his Route 66 series.

[RonBoyd]

And to the implication that "manipulating" an image is ethically wrong:

Photographers are visual liars | Photodoto

[mathjak107]

im now an artist ha ha ha .....actually theres room for both being a photographer and being an artist. how many of the same pictures of the same buildings can we all stand to look at . but the creativity that comes out of digital editing is never ending..... really depends on what you want. my flowers, my macro photography i like to be accurate, but anything else all bets are off

[retire@40]

Maybe we will finally see a good UFO picture soon.

[mathjak107]

heres an attempt at some hdr pics at the park yesterday, no editing other than sharpening and the hdr process.

Picasa Web Albums - MATTY - HDR PICS JPEGS