Shooting High Dynamic Range Hippos - 07:35 am
02 Mar 2010
Many of the images I have posted here lately have used a relatively new photographic technique known as High Dynamic Range (HDR) Photography. This technique produces some very interesting results and I thought I would share some tips and tricks with you using some of the photos of Hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius) that I took today.
If you want to learn how to shoot and process HDRs there are many places online that you can go and find them. I would however recommend the two episodes of Pixel Perfect (an awesome video tutorial podcast created by Revision3) that I have embedded below.
Once you are familiar with this technique you should immediately see that the major drawback is that you need a completely static scene (ie no with no movement) to produce a quality result. I have been playing around with the software and have found a way to produce some very interesting HDR results from a single RAW photograph.
Most modern digital cameras should give you the option to shoot in RAW mode. This format records only the pixel brightness values from the sensor of the camera. It does not apply the normal adjustment (ie tone curves, colour saturation etc) that are added to the image when you should in JPEG mode. This means that you have to make these adjustments to your images manually in post but it also gives you an incredible amount of latitude to play with. You can follow the instructions given in the video tutorials above but instead of having to go out a sequence of images you can take a single RAW image and export 5 copies of it each with a different exposue value. I use Adobe Lightroom to process my images and have found the following exposure settings work the best.
If you are using an image with an exposure compensation of 0 then you will to export copies of the image with the following values.
-2, -1, 0, +1, +2
You can then load these images into your HDR processing software and follow the steps outlined in the video tutorials above. If you have a play with this and would like to send your images into us please with Chris Harries HDR in the subject of your email.
P.S. If you use a Mac there is a brand new FREE piece of software that makes processing HDR photos really easy. see Ohanaware
Happy snapping!
- Chris Harries
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