HDR Photography
High Dynamic Range Imaging is a process for getting more exposure information for a single image than is currenly possible with camera sensors. It is really useful for taking pictues where there is a vast difference in lighting conditions, high contrast conditions. Your eye is has a large dynamic range, and one of the frustrations with photography is how often the picture you take doesn’t look anything like the scene you observed. Taking interior photographs of stained glass windows is a good example. For proper exposure of the window, everything else is dark, while if you set the exposure to see the interior architecture, the windows are very overexposed. With HDR, both areas are visible.
With the proliferation of digital cameras and software for image manipulation, HDR photography has become very easy to try, as is evidenced by the number of examples on flickr. I love the images that result, and how they can be either quite life-like or very surreal. So I started trying it. My Canon XTi has an automatic exposure bracketing (AEB) mode, which makes it easy to get an under exposed and over exposed image right after the normal exposure. Coupled with the software for combination and tonemapping provided by Photomatix, it is easy to play with HDR photography.
While in France, I took advantage of the AEB, and came home with many sets of images. I have been playing around with the images, and here are some of the results…
A few more are in the gallery section:
