High Dynamic Range Photography (HDR)

HDR Photo

A photography skill I have come to know and love is HDR.  This stands for High Dynamic Range.  A camera can only expose on part of a scene for one photo.  This translates into a subject of a photo being the proper color; not too light and not too dark.  Your background or certain parts of the subject could be shaded differently. To get rid of this unwanted contrast the photographer must take multiple pictures at different exposures.  This is called bracketing.  I made a good example to show the photos I used to make the picture shown above.

Bracketed photos used in HDR

To change the exposure on photos quickly, many photographers use something called "Exposure Bias" a.k.a. "EV."  0 EV is the normal exposer of what the camera would take a picture of if you just pressed the shutter button.  As you can see, there is a definite difference in the -2EV and the 2EV.  The first shot pretty much disregards the bridge and focuses on gathering dramatic colors in the sky.  -.7 EV and 0 EV gathers most of the main colors in the bridge while there is almost no color in the sky.  The last two shots help add brightness to dark, shadowed areas of the photo with complete disregard to any colors in the sky.  Once the photos are on your computer, you can merge them to create an HDR image.  My personal preference is to use Photomatix (which is also the most popular application for HDR) to merge my bracketed pictures, but any program is fine.  Happy shooting!

P.S. Many photographers use HDR for everything and end up getting a picture that looks very un-natural.  It is good to try and keep your photo fairly natural looking and not like a big mess of colors.