Tuesday, February 5, 2013

My First HDR Image

January 31, 2013

After a day spent at home with the family, and having been in the house for well over a week, I was ready to go outside and shoot. I chose to wait until after dark to try some experimental photography. I have a Canon TS-E 24mm f/3.5 L that I love to shoot with, but really don't use often. When I do, it's mainly to shoot buildings, and that is what I planned for tonight.

What I hadn't planned on was just how cold it became after dark! With wind chill bringing the outside temperature down to -11°F I knew the first building I'd shoot would be the ONLY building I'd shoot. I drove to a small white church just outside of town. Built in 1852 the Springdale Lutheran Church stands atop a ridge. Lit up, it offered an interesting subject. I quickly parked in their lot, set up the tripod, set up my parameters, and then began to shoot as quickly as I could. Not really wanting to play around in the freezing wind I simply took exposures from 30 seconds, up to 1 second, and every stop in between. I shot two sets of images, the bottom of the church, and then the top of the church using the shift feature of my lens.


My first HDR image. The reddish clouds are from the lights of Madison to the East.

When I came back to the house, my hands aching from the cold, and took a look at my images, I realized I had a perfect opportunity to try HDR processing. I've seen a lot of really bad HDR images over the past few years. Here's a HDR Google Image Search to illustrate. While some folks really like the exaggerated, graphic quality of the images, I do not. I prefer HDR that has a more natural tonal value.

Never having done it before, it took me a while to sort out an initial technique. First I loaded all my exposures, one set at a time, into HDR Pro in CS5. After a lot of experimenting I narrowed my processing down to three exposures. It was a much broader range of exposure times than most of the tutorials suggested. At 30 seconds you could see setting, and back ground details, but the church was completely blown out. At the shorted end of the exposure spectrum I could see lots of details of the white church, and everything else was as black as a cave.

Eventually I was able to create an image that, to me, looked like what I saw when I was there in front of the church. Is it perfect? Not by a LONG shot! I have a lot of learning to do before I consider myself even slightly proficient in HDR. I guess I'll have to experiment with it a lot more over the course of this year's project.

Here's a little tutorial video on the subject.

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