Greetings and salutations!
A common contention between
photographers is whether to shoot in film or digital. The purist feels that the
soul of the image lies in the chemical process of film and can only be captured
by this time honored, analogistic art form. Whereas, the modern photographer
revels in the inexhaustible manipulative options that can only be found in a
digital medium. Who is right? Which is better? Marvel or DC? Chocolate or
vanilla? Who knows. One thing is for sure though, your answer all comes down to
one thing: personal preference.
In this
installment I will be exploring a process that is only available to the digital
photographer called High Dynamic Range
(or HDR, for short).
For those
who know what the concept of HDR is, I don’t wish to enter into a geek-duel
over the math of the process, but for the novice, it goes something like this…
A million
years ago, when cavemen only had film cameras, their only way of manipulating
exposure was either by physically combining two separate photographs or by a
manipulative process of “dodging and burning” in the darkroom. A common
problem, mostly found in landscape photographs, was picking the proper
exposure. For example, if a photographer would want the sky to be properly
exposed, most times the foreground would be to dark and muddy. On the other
hand, if the photographer were to properly expose the foreground, the sky would
be over exposed (described as “blown out”). A common fix to this would be for
the photographer to take two photographs of the same scene at different
exposures and physically splice the two negatives together before the post-production
of the print in the darkroom.
By
understanding this concept, we can begin to understand what HDR photography is
all about. With a digital camera, it is easy to take a set of bracketed
photographs. Bracketing is when you take a series of photographs with different
exposures. Generally, this is a series of anywhere from 3 to 5 photographs
which start at being underexposed, then properly exposed, and then finally
overexposed.
This is
where the magic of HDR comes into play. By using a computer logarithm, the
program finds the best exposures from all of these photographs and combines
them into one image. This process produces images that are neither muddy nor
blown out. The results are nothing but astounding.
But enough
of this technical jibber-jabber, let’s see some of these photos! I thought that
this photo would be a good example of an HDR image. This is not the first HDR
image, (I really don’t think there is an official “first HDR image”) but it is
of historical interest as being the first HDR image ever to hang in the
Smithsonian.
This photo is The fourth of July on Lake Austin by Trey Ratcliff (2007). As you can see, the photo sports the usual HDR trappings. The colors are vibrant and the tonality is even throughout the photo. Trey Ratcliff has a great website called “stuck in customs”. This is a link to one of my favorite collections of his… http://stuckincustoms.smugmug.com/Burning-Man-Page
Do yourself a favor and check it out. -Tim
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