I love HDR, it really is an amazing way to get the most out of a difficult scene. Dont get me wrong though, I am not a fan of the “overcooked” HDR look, like you see in this image below:
What I am talking about is the really great images that make a scene look surreal and dream like while not losing too much of its authenticity. HDR can revolutionise your photos and I use it when the lighting is tricky or I want to get a dramatic shot. It has helped me out on many occasions, and the results have been amazing. I took a photo of my old school hall at KES, it is a large cavernous hall and at the best of times it is dark. So, i took 4 shots with 1 f-stop between each and HDR’d it in Photomatix. Photomatix is freely available to download and play with.
The best shot I could get on the day showed the hall with reasonable exposure but the windows blowing out. After running it through the software, the results were much better. Take a look below, the first image was the bright image and the second image was the combination of 4 differently exposed images.
The difference is marked and the HDR process adds so much to the richness of the image. So, you are asking, how do i get into HDR, well my first suggestion is do a search on google on HDR and take it from there. My second bit of advice is get some good software like photomatix and use that. You can use the HDR process in Adobe Photoshop, but find that it is not really good at all, and I am a HUGE Photoshop fan, but they need to work on their HDR processor.
If you want to see some good examples of how HDR can be done, take a look at some of these guys on Flickr:
Rags
Daniel KHC
So go on, try your hand at HDR, it really is worth it, the next step from there is DRI, but more of that at another time…
Technorati Tags: HDR, photography, photos, dynamic, surreal, images, flickr, KES, Dynamic Range