Getting Artsy with HDR Photography: First Attempt

One of the parts of Photography I have always found to be really cool has been HDR or High Dynamic Range photography. To sum it up it is sort of like overlaying 3 different exposures of the same photo together to create some pretty surreal images. For a better explanation I invite you to check out Wikipedia as it gets a bit more into the fundamentals behind the cool image processing technique.

One thing I have always wanted to do was get more into HDR photography because it does not really require one to purchase more gear so it can be a cost-effective way of getting more artsy with your digital photography.

Since I purchased a Canon XSi it supports the RAW format for photos. RAW is pretty much just an uncompressed format for your photos which keeps all the data intact and that allows you to do more because your post-processing will have more information to play with, unfortunately the files for RAW are usually quite large.

The other aspect of HDR photography is that you can take at least 3 different exposures of the scene you are shooting. With the Canon XSi you are able to auto-bracket the exposure to a maximum of +/- 2. It is also best to use a camera tripod to minimal any camera shake.

On to my subject

I was at Robyn’s place in the West End of Vancouver while she was at work and thought that after the rain it left some pretty decent dark clouds but was still somewhat bright as the sun was trying to peak out through them. I thought setting up the tripod on her balcony could prove to offer a decent scene for me to try out creating my first HDR photo.

As you can see from the original shot that the day looked like. With the clouds, the buildings a few trees I thought this might turn out to be a decent looking HDR shot so I set up the tripod and camera and went about shooting 3 shots with +-2 for exposure using the Canon XSi’s Auto-Bracket Exposure feature. I also first tried shooting in JPEG which I found out to be a mistake when creating HDR photos. Though I have heard that people are successful in creating HDR photos using JPEGs but for me this did not work so I reshot the scene using RAW as my outputted format.

A program that helps make the HDR photo processing a lot easier is Photomatix though at $99 for a single licence it is a bit pricy, especially those on a tight budget. Though I would like you to know if you had a previous version (v2) like I did, upgrading to the latest seems to allow you to keep the program registered. You can use Photoshop CS and above to do HDR processing, but I only recommend people with a lot of experience with Photoshop to try it as it is much more involved.

Now I am not sure what settings to use when creating an HDR photo using Photomatrix but I played around with the slide bars until I thought it looked cool so the above image is what I recreated with my 3 different exposures and I like the outcome of it. What do you think?

One of the local photographers whose work I admire is Duane Storey and his HDR photography completely amazes me. You can check out his Flickr set for his HDR photos of various local landscapes here in Vancouver.