I recently went on a photography road trip with Paul Concepcion and Nic Lawrenz. It was a great weekend for stormy cloudscapes, peppered with moments of the iconic wide, open expanses of blue sky and green prairie.
This is my first successful attempt at High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography. I processed the photo using Mac freeware, HDRtist, keeping the effect to about 75%, and then I tweaked the photo in Lightroom.
HDR photography is the use of multiple exposures of the same composition to create a single photo, allowing a greater range of light intensity to be portrayed. The human eye can read light extremely well, adjusting to a dimly lit room or direct sunlight on a summer day, but a camera has difficulty capturing all of that information.
Typically, you take at least three exposures. The first will be exposed “correctly” according to your camera’s meter (0), so choose your settings accordingly. The second and third exposures should be at +2 and -2, which you change either through automatic bracketing or quickly by manually adjusting the exposure compensation. Don’t change your ISO, shutter speed, or aperture settings. Your camera needs to be completely stationary, so on a tripod or flat surface. The photos themselves should look correctly exposed and then under and overexposed.
Underexposing shows the detail in the highlights. Here, that’s the sun.
Exposing “correctly” captures detail in the mid-range of light.
Overexposing captures detail in the shadows. Here, that’s the grass.
