HDR RANT - Part 1

This is Part 1 of my research into HDR photography.  Contrary to what I say in the video, the verdict is still out on my feelings towards HDR.  Part 1 goes into the simple explanation of what HDR is and the basics of how it works.  Part 2 will bring you a full tutorial on HDR from an expert in the field.  Be sure to check out some of the samples I pulled from Gizmodo after the break

These sample images are borrowed from Gizmodo’s HDR Shooting Challenge which asked people to send in their best HDR shots.  Below is a quick selection of some ok and some terrible examples.  Stay tuned for HDR RANT – Part 2 for a detailed Tutorial.

The above image was captured by one of the GOD’s of HDR.  In Part 2 I will mention his

name as well as share his tutorial on HDR with his permission.  He has an amazingly detailed

HDR tutorial that opened and closed by eyes to HDR if that makes sense.

The above image is the one that captured my attention the most.  It was captured inside a

warehouse and just looked really cool to me.  Its not your normal landscape HDR image

that you are used to seeing.

In this image you start to see how HDR works, it lets you expose the sky properly and the building

properly but to me just doesn’t look right with how bright the building is, agree?

This is where I find HDR to be interesting and sometimes amazing.  These night images really pop, you have a deep sky, a crazy looking building and an overall interesting shot.

This is where HDR goes bad, when you can see the separation of the sky and tree, it just

becomes a distraction.

This shot almost looks like its not HDR but it is.  In this case subtle tweaks make this

images look better than others.

This is an extreme example of HDR, a lot of tweaking was done here to make everything

glow.  But for something like this i feel it actually worked.