Since my website is actually based on a blog software, I might as well start using it as one, so here’s my first actual bit of (hopefully) interesting text, about photography in general and HDR photography in particular.

HDR landscape

Ever since I got rid of all my heavy, clunky and not even all that good dslr gear and bought myself a Panasonic GF1 mirrorless interchangeable lens camera and a bunch of manual lenses for the money, my photo collection has been expanding at an explosive rate. I could probably fill a whole page with how the micro four thirds system is perfect for me (fits in my already cluttered handbag for one thing) but I won’t, because that’s boring. Less talk, more pictures!

my precious

One area that I’ve always liked is landscapes. I just like going outside and taking pictures, and I like landscapes and nature. To take nice landscape pictures you’re very reliant on the light and weather. I never liked going outdoors midday when the sun was too bright. Either the sky just turned bright white in my photos or the foreground too dark. Grey skies? Even worse, impossible to take nice landscape photos or any photos at all in that weather, everything was just colourless. Sure you can add more colour and contrast to your photos but there’s not much you can do about over or underexposed areas and total lack of cloud detail.

I had to hope for a sunny evening where the light was less contrasty, the sun less powerful, to actually take usable photos. And that time frame in a day is usually quite short (and forget about getting up early for the sunrise, that’s just not going to happen with me), so my opportunities to take nice photos outdoors were very limited and only popped up when I was in the right place… at the right time… in the right weather… oh yeah, and if I didn’t have my camera with me I’d kick myself. This was one of the lucky situations:

lucky weather with dark sky and sunlit foreground, no real need for HDR

However, recently I came across HDR photography – a technique where you take multiple exposures of the same scene and blend them together with something called HDR tone mapping. I’d seen some (to my eyes) very ugly photos, with an overprocessed look popping up here and there. I started seeing them more and more, it seemed almost like a plague.

"art" (or how to mangle a photo)

But there were also some good ones, particularly of landscapes. The funny thing is that most people probably don’t even realise when a good landscape photo uses HDR (neither did I), it just somehow looks special, better than the rest. Just has something about it you can’t put your finger on. I figured these people were just a lot more skilled.

So I was intrigued by HDR (also by the fact that so many people managed to produce such horrible results, pardon me) and I got reading and experimenting, trying the various presets in a HDR tone mapping app with flakey results. I’m guessing that’s how a lot of people arrive at their “creations” – clicking a preset and calling it “art”. Then I came across this very old but very detailed and informative tutorial. It’s from 2006 and the software he talks about now has many more options, but generally it’s all still true:

http://www.naturescapes.net/docs/index.php/articles/189

I didn’t actually read it all the way to the end, shame on me, I got carried away taking pictures… But to summarise, the goal of using HDR photography and tone mapping is to capture and represent as much of the original range of brightness of a scene in  one photo – the sun being the brightest point and the shady forest floor the darkest for example. With just one exposure you can only choose one – either a blown out white sky or an underexposed forest floor. And that’s what’s been plaguing my landscape photography.

completely overlit sky - a situation where HDR is needed

Now my workflow is to take 7 pictures using the exposure bracketing of my GF1 (you can also do it manually with exposure compensation, most cameras will let you do that, and you can use as few as 3 images – one underexposed, one normal and one overexposed) – in raw format of course, because that contains a little extra dynamic range compared to a jpg. I let Photoshop merge these into one HDR image (File > automate > Merge to HDR Pro in CS5) and then convert that to a 16bit image with Photoshop’s HDR tone mapping. And that’s where a lot of the magic happens. The most important bit is the toning curve, here you can very precisely control the shadows, highlights and anything inbetween.

the main control in the process

The truth is that there’s no single preset that works for all your HDR photos. Every single photo requires it’s own finetuning, but that’s part of the fun. At one point it just all falls into place, then I press OK. From there on the work isn’t done yet of course, there’s still plenty of tweaking you can do with adjustment filters, selective dodging of dark areas, etc (that’s also why it’s important to convert it to 16bit and not straight to 8bit.)

Here are some before and after pics of HDR photos I made recently, as you can see, the original photos were just your average type of boring photo – over/underexposed and lacking cloud detail. HDR tone mapping and additional Photoshop adjustments add the magic:

Before and after HDR treatment, click to enlarge

click to enlarge

click to enlarge

HDR opens up a whole new world of options for landscapes and architecture. You can turn literally anything into something appealing. You can use it to reveal prettiness and detail in something that not even your eyes noticed. You can find the photos from this post on my Flickr page.