While poking around the Internet, I found a website showing off High Dynamic Range photos taken on a "cloudy, grey day in Tokyo." These photos inspired me today to create some of my own High Dynamic Range photos.

High Dynamic Range, or HDR as the Photoshop plug-in is called, is something that has recently become a talked about feature on the internet and among photography circles since its introduction with Photoshop CS2 last spring. It seems that the first thing that most people want to do with HDR is to take a photo of a scene with lots of shadows and lots of highlights, like a sunset, or something. I've tried this with limited success.

The problem is that it's hard to effectively turn an HDR photo into a representation of reality, because reality doesn't have shadows and highlights both properly exposed. So your photo looks very surreal, and that's not what most people want. Sure, you've managed to capture all of this detail, but you've captured more detail than the human eye can actually see, making the photo actually not what you expected. The aforementioned photo of the Duck Pond has that feel to it, where you're not quite sure if it is real.

The solution is to shoot photos that are meant to be misrepresentations of reality. Instead of moving the curves around to get what you thought you saw, move them around to get something totally different. That's what the guy I linked to above did. To see what I could do with his technique, I decided to go walk around Virginia Tech and shoot some HDR photos. Quite coincidentally, and quite fortunately, this past Sunday was a really cloudy day. This condition worked much to my advantage by not having bright sunlight in some areas, and black shadows in others.

My trusty D200 has this feature on it where you can bracket up to nine frames in both directions by 1/3, 2/3 or 1 stop intervals. I set my camera up to bracket all nine frames at 2/3 stop intervals. 1 stop intervals causes the extremes to be black at one end and white at the other, giving no real detail at all, which is really counter to the point. 2/3 stop intervals at least allows there to be some space between each photo in terms of brightness, doesn't blow out the extremes, and provides enough information to Photoshop to get some detail.

Each shot was made using a tripod. The tripod is essential because you have to ensure that each photo is exactly the same as each other photo. For each shot, I let the camera meter using matrix metering and aperture priority mode, then I took nine pictures, and then I moved on to the next. I did use a small aperture of f/11 and f/18 in order to get some depth of field in each shot.

Of course, there are millions of websites out there talking about HDR and how awesome it is, but the thing that most people don't talk about when explaining how to use HDR is how to creatively convert your photo down from 32-bits to 8-bits. When converting from 32-bits to 8-bits, Photoshop brings up this funky wizard that is pretty much non-intuitive and requires guess and check -- but then isn't most creative photography a guessing process? The method that gives you the most flexibility when bringing an HDR photo down to 8-bits is the Local Adaptation method, shown below. I found that if you make the line fit the curve on the left, and then -- depending on how black you want the sky -- you can pull it up or down toward the right hand side of the curve. Here is an example that I used for this photo of Burruss Hall.


Finally, the best situation I have found for using HDR, when one wishes to create dramatic scenes, has been when there are high levels of contrast between colors in the photo, but not necessarily high levels of contrast in the brightness of the photo. Find a scene with white colors, bright colors like yellow or pink or blue, and then some darker colors or gray colors. That's how you'll create the most interesting photos.

As I said before, it seems that everyone wants to use HDR to shoot sunsets or crap like that. But really, high levels of contrast in brightness does not create the interesting photo. It's high levels of contrast in the colors.