High Dynamic Range Photography

I was able to practice more HDR photography on the Elk hunt last week.  HDR photography is an effort to see into all the highlights, shadows, and mid-tones at the same time.  For these photos I took three separate pictures.  One exposed “correctly”, one at +2 EV (plus to f-stops), and one at –2 EV (minus 2 f-stops).  I only changed the shutter speed between the exposure in order to keep the same depth of field (DOF).  Photoshop has a merging feature that takes all 3 photos and tries to interpolate which areas of each photo to keep so that you get a higher dynamic range of details in the highlights, shadows, and mid-tones all merged into one photo.  Then I tried out all sorts of presets and filters to change the look even more.  I really liked the surrealistic look on these landscape images.

This last one has a similar idea of extending the dynamic range, but I did it by overlaid one photo on top of another and erased the areas in the shadows to show the portions the grass and sign on the lower layer.  I had processed this the same way I did for the images above, but I didn’t like the way the sky turned out.  So, I used the sky I liked from one photo and the ground and fence I liked from another.

By the way, we camped right next to the reservation line.  This sign says, “Strictly Closed Area For Non-Members  - No Access - No Hunting.”  In case you tried to read it.  One guy in our group saw a herd of about forty Elk just on the “member side.”  Unfortunately, they never decided to come over to our side of the fence in this area while we were there.

As I’ve studied HDR photography, I’ve heard a lot about tone mapping.  I think I’ll dig into that deeper next time I do some HDR photos.  I’ve also heard a lot of good things about Photomatix software for processing the HDR images.  I’ll have to give that a try too.