While browsing Flickr for some new wallpapers, I notice a lot of landscapes/cityscapes are captured using “HDR photography”.
Is this supposed to look good? All the photos look incredibly artificial, as if they’ve been rendered by a computer. I suppose it’s supposed to capture depth information left out of a normal photo, but all the examples I’ve seen look plain bizarre—incredibly foreboding skies, that look like nothing I’ve ever seen in nature, seem to be a common theme.
The idea of HDR photography is that, while our eyes can resolve a range of about 10 stops of light, cameras typically can only capture about 5 or 6. The solution to this nowadays is to capture a scene using 3, 5, or even seven different exposures, some underexposed, some over and one in the middle. Then, with the magic of the computer, combine those exposures together to show much more range than usual. Of coarse, as with any new technique, some people just take things too far.
I agree. Most of the HDR you see out there on Flickr and similar sites is terribly artificial looking. But HDR is helpful, especially when you’re trying to burn in sky detail. I don’t use the technique often myself, but I will sometimes give myself an extra exposure, about two or three stops under my normal exposure, to help with eking out additional highlight detail. I use it in the sort of place where one would normally employ a neutral density graduated filter to help balance the sky exposure with the foreground exposure.
There’s lots of HDR blending software out there, most of which is junk. Poor software will leave halos around trees as it tries to blend the blown-out sky. Even the best HDR image can look somewhat artificial, but I’ve seen examples that work quite well, especially for indoor shots that have windows.
One interesting thing about it is exposing the same thing in multiple light conditions. So you can get an image taken in the dark with incredible detail. Things like that.
At its most basic level, imagine taking a picture of a dark stone church against a bright sky with an interesting cloudscape. Either you expose for the church and the sky is blown out to white, or you expose for the clouds and the church is reduced to a silhouette.
Or, you do both, and take two (or more) exposures and blend them. Done correctly, the scene will look much as it would to the naked eye (the eye and brain are very good at compensating for vastly different light levels).
I think this is a very good example of what HDR can (and should) do.
Weird stuff like this is usually what people’s eyes and gets spread around (for better or for worse), but the intent is not to make everything look like Gotham City on LSD.
(Of course, this and all art is up to interpretation, but I think there’s a lot of people out there who’ve seen these cartoony HDR images that don’t even look like photos and have no idea that the idea is to make photos more realistic than what they start out as.)