You left out the Elvis Hobbits.
On black velvet.
I’m not sure what the problem is with HDR. As I understand it (which may be totally off, granted), it’s a process that makes everything in the photograph appear to be highly in-focus, right? So wherever you look at the photo, what you’re looking at is in focus.
Doesn’t this more accurately mimic our normal visual experience? Wherever I focus my eyes in the world around me, that point is in focus. When I shift my gaze to a new point, the new point is in focus.
Traditional photography can only place a single range of points in focus; when you look at a traditional photo, you can shift your own focus to a new point, and the new point remains out of focus (as well as the photograph’s focus, since you’re not focusing on it yourself).
Why is HDR bad, except inasmuch as it doesn’t mimic traditional photography?
Daniel
No. You’re talking about depth-of-field. HDR is the process by which you take multiple exposures to capture as much of the dynamic range (deepest shadows to brightest highlights) in the image as possible. In high contrast scenes, the extremes of brightness and darkness will not be possible to capture (this applies to both film and digital). This means, let’s say you have a picture with objects in deep shadow and a bright sky above. If you expose for detail in the shadow, your sky will be completely overexposed and blow out. It will turn to white. If you expose for the sky, and get the beautiful blues or whatever you see, it will turn the deep shadow areas into pure black. So, what you do is take one picture exposed for the highlights, one for the shadows, and perhaps one for the midtones, and combine them all in an image editing program in a way that preserves all the details in the highlights, shadows, and everywhere in between. Basically, you’re compressing a huge tonal range to one that is reproducible in your target medium (print, LCD, projection, etc.)
Well, I’d argue no (returning to your depth-of-field point). When you’re looking at an object, the general experience is that that object is in focus, so I’d argue that selective focus better mimics our normal visual experience. Sure, when our eyes dart around, we refocus, but quite often in our photographs we want to establish a single center of focus to lead the eye to the subject of our picture. In this way, selective focus mimics the visual experience better.
Traditional photography can put pretty much all points in focus. Look up hyperfocal focusing. Even without getting technically hyperfocal, most little point-and-shoots, when set to a typical wide angle focus length like 35mm are pretty damn close to being hyperfocal when your subject is a few feet away from you. Look at your old vacation snapshots. I’ll bet the bulk of them everything in the picture looks in focus.
Well, hyperfocality is available and common in traditional photography. HDR (compressing dynamic range) is not bad in and of itself. It’s a pretty cool look when done right, and it can be completely natural-looking as well. (I use something like HDR when I created burn layers in Photoshop, which mimics burning negatives in the darkroom.) However, like any Photoshop filter or technique, it can be overused, and most of the examples I’ve seen out there of HDR look like over-wrought, artificial-looking crap.
Um… I don’t think this is HDR guys. If you read the story, it was taken as a set of 3 impromptu shots without a tripod. HDR shots involved multiple, carefully aligned shots shot with different apertures.
No they don’t. You can just set your camera to bracket, take three exposures, and auto-align in Photoshop. That’s what I do. And I generally control the exposure through shutter speed in HDR, not aperture (as I want my depth of field to be the same through the pictures), but you can do it either way. Plus you can do pseudo-HDR if you shoot in RAW and export, for example, one photo at base exposure, one photo at -1.5, one photo at +1.5, and combine those in Photoshop.
Like I said upthread, I don’t necessarily think it’s strictly HDR, but it does have a look consistent with that type of processing.
Just to add some more info to this thread about Snoqualmie Falls…
A site about the falls (Click the ‘Photos’ links for a ton of photos of the falls.)
photo of the rock the fisherman was standing on.
My opinion is that it could be real. I’ve been to the falls a bunch of times, and to the base. The falls have created a very narrow canyon about 250 feet below the top edge, so light can only shine all the way down to the water at certain times of day. You get the sun shining through the mist of the falls just right… could be a non-manipulated photo.
That being said, he is a hobby photographer that works for a local TV station, so he’s not just Mom and Pop out there with a $100 Nikon camera that got lucky.
Am I looking at the right picture? The boring one with a lot of mist and a few dead leaves, and some guys doing something in the distance? It doesn’t look like Kinkade to me.
Wow. These could be the next Dogs Playing Poker.
:eek::eek::eek::eek: Scary image! BAD image! I sentence you to painting Gandalf in a Yankees uniform. 
Very well. I’ll get on it right after I finish up my hobo clown Saruman.
And thus, this technique is doing something your eyes cannot easily do. If you look at something shadowed in the distance, with something bright intervening, you can’t see into those shadows and discern much of anything. You’d have to block out the bright so your eye would open the iris and allow enough light in from the shadowed areas.
But I take issue with this statement. When you look at something, unless there is a hugely disparate difference in the range, you simply do not perceive anything in your field of view as being “out of focus” the same way it can be in a photograph. While it may be artistically important to use selective focus in a picture, it’s not replicating what we see at all. Of course, unless you are doing something that is stereoptic, you won’t anyway, since what does happen with objects at different distances is that we see two of the closer object when focused on the farther away object, and vice versa.
As for use of image processing software: if I the viewer am assuming that this is the functional equivalent of what you would get by exposing real film in a camera, whether masks or filters are involved, and doing nothing other than simple re-touching during the developing and printing process, then the artist should state that it’s not a photograph, it’s a digital image. Not because of any reason other than that’s what I, the naive viewer, would expect and understand. 
But my eyes have a larger dynamic range than film or CCDs, so HDR can be used to compensate for their shortcoming. I can switch between looking outside and inside quickly, and see both. A single exposure just can’t achieve that using natural light.
The technique can be overused like you say, but it can also be used to more closely emulate what you’d see.
And I would argue that it does replicate the way we see better than having the picture be hyperfocal. I’m looking at my computer monitor right now. If I don’t shift my eyes, I can see in the periphery that everything looks fuzzy. The bookshelf, the photograph, the coffeetable–it’s all blurry. Of course, as soon as I shift to look at those objects, they become sharp, while the computer screen becomes blurry. The effect may not be as extreme as what happens when you really open up your lens to f/2 and get in close, but it’s not the same effect as f/22, where everything in my field of vision is in focus. If you do the math on it, the aperture of the eye ranges from f/2 (in dark situations) to about f/8 or so in brightness.
Now, what ZenBeam is saying about HDR being used to account for our eyes’ much larger dynamic range, that I completely agree with. HDR done in that manner does more closely replicate our viewing experience.
Hobbits playing poker.
Orphan Hobbit children with really big, sad eyes.
Travel prints of Hobbit girls water skiing, With caption Visit Scenic Rivendell.