Lately, and mostly due to this
great blog I’ve been getting more interested in HDR. HDR stands for
high dynamic range and the meaning is photographs where the variance of luminane is larger than usual. Usually when you take an outdoors photograph, either you can see people’s faces and the sky is all white (burned out), or you can see the blue of the sky but the people appear to be in shadow. Similarly, when you take a photograph during sunset, when the sky is still bright but the land is dark, its hard to capture all the details.
HDR helps to fill the gap. The usual procedure is to capture several photos in a row, each of them with different settings. Each one will capture different details along the dynamic range. I.e. one will capture details in the sky, one will capture the mid-tones and one will see the details in the shadows.
Given these images you now need to combine them somehow into a single image (you can use Photoshop or Photomatix or several other programs). The second step (same programs used) is to tone-map the image into a low dynamic range image. Unfortunately your computer display isn’t able to show so much details and so you need to somehow compress the images into the maximum variance allowed onscreen.
Tone mapping can create some pretty funky results and that’s why I wasn’t too keen on trying HDR until now. But ‘stuck in customs’ creates such great photographs, without an alien surreal look and so I jumped head first. So
here you can find some of my first attempts, I took these images in the Dubnov park in Tel-Aviv.
Cheers, lior
