So I know I’m always the last one to the party when it comes to this stuff, but I have to share. I’ve been watching this ongoing trend in photography - it started when I saw some photographs by people on Flickr and then some in galleries and thought, you know, that shouldn’t be possible. I mean, it shouldn’t be possible to take that photo - with that amount of light, shadow, and detail all around.
And it turns out, it’s not.
It’s called High Dynamic Range, or HDR, photography - and it involves taking multiple photos at multiple exposures, then layering them and mapping the tones (plus some playing with the color curve), to get stunning photographs with perfect light, perfect shadows, perfect detail all around. Basically - you can get perfect sunsets without washed out people, and perfect landscapes without blank or too-bright skies.
When I first saw the technique, I thought it must be really difficult, so I decided not to go there. But I read a few tutorials and investigated, and I decided to give it a try. So I downloaded Photomatix, the program you need to map the multiple photographs onto each other, and I already have Aperture and Photoshop, and it was actually pretty easy.
Granted, I’m just getting started and I know that I have only discovered about 1/100th of what Photomatix can do - but let me just tell you, it’s amazing.
Here are some first tries. Since I’m just getting started, they’re nothing spectacular, but it’s definitely an exciting new realm nonetheless.
So aside from the fact that the frame on the last one looks retarded (sorry, that’s another thing I’m teaching myself how to do on Photoshop) - I’m learning the ropes of the HDR process. These photos aren’t spectacular because I kind of cheated… rather than take three separate shots, I actually just used Aperture to manipulate old photos into three versions with exposures that I changed after the fact. I can’t wait to try it with three different photographs.
This is a really exciting technique for me… I’ve been letting my digital media/art tools gather dust for a long time now and this was just the edge I needed to draw me back into the fold. I can’t wait to see what I create!
