I’ve been reading a lot about HDR photography, and was inspired by these 2 collections of HDR photos: 20 great HDR photos part 1 and part 2. I decided to give it a shot, having never done it before, and only using my Canon powershot SD 750.

HDR stands for “High Dynamic Range“, it is a photography term. I’ll distill it down for you as I understand it, you take several pictures of the exact same thing, usually from a tripod, but each time your exposure values are changed. If you took old school photos with a 35mm, that’s increasing/decreasing the shutter speed to generate under/overexposed photos. If you’re on a point-and-shoot digital it’s changed the EV value from -2 up to +2 over a series of shots. HDR is typically in high contrast situations, for instance, shooting into the sun: if you expose the sun properly everything in the foreground is dark, if you expose the foreground properly the background will be washed out (backlit). But, when taken of everyday things that you wouldn’t ‘need’ HDR for, you can get stunning results:

Now mine isn’t necessarily stunning, but it is pretty cool looking, and quite dramatic when you consider the originals:

After you take the originals you combine them is Photoshop, it has an HDR feature, and then to really bring out the surrealism you apply a filter made by HDRSoft called Photomatix.

It was definitely a good first try, I think this will come in pretty handy since I like to take pictures of skylines when I travel all the time, we’ll see what I come up with.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 5:27 pm and is filed under Random. 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.