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HDR....high dynamic range photography....how and when

It is quiet difficult to capture an image or scenary that is detail in every element. Try to capture a building in a shadow, when the building detail can be seen, the sky and clouds will look flat white. When the sky and clouds detail can be seen, the building will look flat dark. This is where high dynamic range (HDR) photography has a high value. HDR will make all, the building, sky and cloud, highly contrast and detail. HDR photography is actually a type of creative photography process. There are several softwares that can be used to process the photo either freely available in the internet as a shareware or require purchase from commercial source.

Normal exposed (0).....sky (left upper corner) is too bright.....people in the stall (right lower corner) is too dark.....only the front part of the stall is nicely highlighted.

Under-exposed (-2)......sky (left upper corner) is higlighted.....others become too dark.

Over-exposed (+2).......the people in the stall is highlighted......others become too bright.
HDR photography requires two conditions to be successful. Firstly, high inter-shutter speed for example at least 5 frames per second (fps). Secondly, camera that is able to capture images by bracketing exposure, for at least 3 bracket images (+2, 0, -2). From these exposure brackets, 3 images will be captured, (1) overexposed, (2) normal exposed, (3) underexposed. If your camera did not have this capacity, you may require rigid tripod to capture the required images. What you need to do is just to adjust your exposure as fast as possible between captures. MAKE SURE YOUR CAMERA IS MAINTAIN AT ONE SPOT. You may loss fast moving object or produced some ghosty images in the final product by this manual methods. Why this occur? Actually, HDR software will, somewhat, overlapse all these images and highlight the most contrast part of each image and put them together in the final product. Thus, the final product of photo will contain a very high contrast and highlighted photo.

HDR product.....all details of the photo can be seen and highlighted.
HDR photography is excellent for sceneries that are not that interesting or beautiful. You can choose different style of final product to suite your interest such as compressed, black & white, painterly, grunge effect etc. Try them and good luck :-)

For more HDR images, please visit my Flickr "comel comot".
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