How to Understand a HDR Image Part 1/2
Hi, everybody. This is Craig Tanner for the Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique. And today’s image was submitted Mark who’s an intermediate photographer. Mark shot this off of the front deck of his condo in downtown Minneapolis. So he had this very dramatic but contrasting sunrise and Mark decided to create an HDR or High Dynamic Range version of the cityscape. Mark took seven different exposures ranging from six seconds all the way to 1125th of a second. He took those different exposures into a stand alone piece of software very popular for creating HDR images called Photomatix. And he shot his one with a Nikon D700. He used a 24 to 70 zoom at 30 mm and Mark said the normal critique suggestions for change but what also what do you think of HDR.
And so I want to talk about the HDR part first just to mention a couple of other things about HDR images. I just purchased Photomatix myself. I’m a little late to the HDR, party in terms of that piece of software. I’ve been doing HDR for a long time. I’ll talk more about that in just a second.
Mark has done the work here in a classical way which is shooting a series of exposures bracketed and then blending those with Photomatix. We’ll also take one shot just potentially either very contrast or too contrast here. Let’ say very flat and using something called tone mapping. I will create an image that has a longer dynamic range and the other neat thing about this kind of HDR is with the tone mapping, you would think that if you got this super dynamic range, you got detail everywhere the image will flatten out with the tone mapping you get local value and color contrast back.
What I think about HDR, I think it’s amazing. I think it’s one of the most amazing things about the idea of digital capture and blending exposures. When I said I’ve been into it for a long time when I got my first digital camera, I was shooting a ton of commercial works still and do a lot of architectural, interior work. And my specialty which was property and I quickly found and loved the idea of manual HDR in Photoshop because it got me out of the business of having to tear my hair out over doing very complicated lighting setups to create the same effect which is in interior to bring the light up inside to help the balance with the light outside without making it look like you’ve added a ton of light to the inside.
Try and do that with lights, no kidding is probably about 10,000 times in order of magnitude harder than doing inside of a Photoshop. I found the HDR but here’s the thing we can use HDR to sort of create a look that matches the tradition of a certain John Rowe photography like I was doing. So we’re just using HDR to match or used to do with lighting and it fit very tightly within a tradition of day time interiors where you lock the windows well a little but it still has some detail there and then the insides a little darker and moody. We got to detail there, that sort of the classic look.
This is an example of an HDR shot where this is a cityscape. Instead of photograph it’s looking a lot more like a painting. So relative to a photography is surreal and what do I think about that, I just think that we have to accept as artist that when we start to present things in a certain context that start to challenge the “either tradition or believability of the thing in that context.” We may have some people that just tone out as just something that we have to accept when we get around in all kinds of ways. We can push ideas that are extraordinary to the point where people do accept them. That’s tough to do but if you fearless you can do it and you also can present shots like this on context where it’s obvious what’s happening. There could be a whole show of HDR images printed on watercolor paper where you’re pushing photography more and more towards something that looks like a painting.
So to me it’s a lot about context. So let’s just no w look at the image and in some respect just forget the HDR part. I love the color. I love exciting color and this image had it. I love the moment. One of the things right away about this image is it makes you think of sort of wanting to, very evocative archetypes either the storm that’s clearing over the city or the impending doom of the storm that’s coming. Real beautiful color, one of my favorite complimentary color pairs blue and orange that’s creating a lot of local depth and this area of the image. There is it down in here, it’s over here, it’s almost everywhere else in the image and that’s working really well. Real powerful movement, I wanted the major diagonals, one of the most basic elements of visual design that you can work with. Just working one of the major diagonals in your shot can be very powerful.
I have a real strong sense of that here and I love these kinds of shots whether they’re HDR or not of twilight where you got a mixture of daylight coming in with manmade lights. You get a lot of exciting colors, cyan contrast so I’m enjoying the moment. Just being a cityscape in some version of twilight. This is a real dramatic image. This thing really gets my attention and there’s a lot of detail in lot of places to move around. The image is really exciting to me and I start to think about perfect world improvement for the image. Coming back to the HDR part real quick and just sort of the work has been done. This would be an area, if it was just okay with this.
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