The Sky Makes the Desert
04 May2010
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HDR Image of a beautiful New Mexican sky
This is my first attempt at serious HDR. I bit the bullet and bought a licencse for Photomatix Lite. Photoshop CS3 has some tone-mapping options for HDR photos, but Photomatix blows CS3 out of the water in that department, and while CS5 is supposedly much better, I'd rather spend $40 than $400, at least for now.
The above image is pretty much out-of-the-box from Photomatix Pro. I had taken 3 bracketed exposures of the desert sky behind my house in New Mexico a couple years ago (makes you wonder why I left, huh?).
If you aren't familiar with HDR (High Dynamic Range), it's basically a way of taking multiple exposures of the same scene and combining them to make a very realistic looking image. I'm not nearly as good at explaining things as wikipedia, so I will direct you there if you are really interested.
I just set my camera to Auto Exposure Bracket at +2/-2, and probably shot this hand-held. The subject is far enough away that any movement I made can be "fixed" with image alignment. Most of the time you'd want a tripod to do it "right".
These are the exposures straight from the camera. You can tell each one has different levels of detail for different parts of the sky or the ground.
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There are countless examples of HDR "gone wrong", but I think good HDR is one that brings out the image as it would look if you were actually there. And I think this particular image does that pretty well.
Reader Comments (3)
It's amazing to me how HDR became such a hot-button issue. I mean, I see absolutely nothing wrong with it, even with the over-the-top, surreal HDR that incenses so many people. I mean, it's a matter of personal taste. I've seen some that I've loved and some that I've not appreciated, much like with *all* photography in general. It's not going to be the end of photography as we know it, so I don't see why people get so upset about it. Photographers can be so fearful of new things. And oh yeah, I love the picture.
Well, no doubt, when a new tool or technique comes out, everyone's going to be playing with it. HDR applied to a bad photo is not going to make a good photo. It's a trending technique, and more people are using it in places they shouldn't. Such is life on the digital photography frontier.
For instance, this, to me, is horrible.
But it's all subjective so I don't know why people bother arguing about it.
Yes, I agree I don't like that picture. However, I was talking about many people's reactions to HDR that it is destroying photography, whether it's well done or not. Of course, it's an exact replica in many ways of the folks who say that *digital* photography isn't *real* photography, whatever the hell that means. I was actually told that once to my face. Nice. HDR is just another tool that can be used well or poorly, nothing more, nothing less.