HDR Photography

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range Imaging ... and they somehow just decided to ignore the 'Imaging' part.

Basically, HDR is a set of techniques that allow a greater range of luminance (light) between the darkest to the lightest areas in an image than the current digital cameras can capture. It (what ever method you are using - I am using a software program with multiple photos) tries to more accurately reproduce what the eye actually sees instead of what is displayed in a photo.

How this is done (in my case), is there is on most DSLR cameras a 'bracketing' feature that when set, will quickly take 3, or 5 or even 7 photos. The camera must not move during this process, so it needs to be on a tri-pod and what the camera does is take one photo with the regular exposure - thus looks like a regular photo. Then it takes one with less exposure (making it darker) and one with more exposure (making it lighter). For those that take sets of 5 or 7 - they take 2 and 3 of each of the light and dark photos.

You then take home your bracketed photos and run them through a program that takes the best of (in my case, my camera only takes 3 so we will go with that) all three photos - taking the dark areas from the light photo, the light areas from the dark photo - where as the regular and especially the light photo - these areas would be 'blown out' meaning they are just one big blob of white with no definition, so taking it from the darkest photo will add that definition back into the photo ... see how that works?

Do you care?


Didn't think so ...


I ran across a web site one day. Don't remember how. Don't remember why. And TOTALLY FELL IN LOVE WITH THE PHOTOS. It was Trey Ratcliffs "Stuck in Customs" web site - dedicated to his photography - mainly HDR photography and I decided I wanted some photos that looked like Trey's.

Took my tri-pod with me to Yellowstone and Gary schlepped it around for me and I got a ton of bracketed shots. Played with them a bit today and realized that I had a rather long ways to go before I come up with anything that looks like Treys. But then again - I didn't trek into Nepal for a week, or hang out in Iceland for 10 days waiting for that perfect sunrise over that glass on the lake either!

I had never seen Tower Falls before so didn't know what to expect (and I am SO out of sync here on dates, sort of skipping ahead ...) and didn't even think that I would want any HDR photos of the falls. I really, really liked the falls, and did not go down to the bottom of the falls with Gary (luckily - especially since he had failed to fully read the 'under construction' sign that stated there was no view of the falls at the bottom - he was not a happy camper when he came back up). So while I waited for him, I did the poor mans method for a tri-pod - set it on something hard and hope for the best since I still needed to hold it, I could not set it down completely and not touch it, but I had a brace of sorts to hold it still.

I liked these photos so I played around with the settings. Which, in a nutshell, is my problem. There are WAY TOO MANY levers, and histograms, and graphs and I am CLUELESS on how to adjust anything to make it look better. When there are 50 settings, it is tough to know where to start!

But here are five of my Tower Falls HDR photo. The jury is still out on whether or not I am liking it ...

A couple of my Upper Falls attempts:

And a couple of the Mammoth Hot Springs:

I guess I need to figure out what I am doing ...