HDR – The future of photography!

Over the past few days I have started experimenting with a new photographic technique called HDR, which stands for High Dynamic Range and have been extremely impressed with the results!

Although the actual concept of HDR is not new, it has, in the past few months it seems, started becoming much more widely talked about and implemented by photographers.

The idea behind HDR is that rather than taking one, correctly exposed photograph of a particular scene, you instead take multiple images at a variety of different exposures, typically three, with one image being underexposed, one overexposed and one correctly exposed. Using specialist software you then combine each of these images into one.

The advantage of this is that the resulting HDR image will contain much more information in relation to the light and dark areas of the image than one single file would. For example, when taking a photo of a typical outdoors landscape scene the camera can often struggle to correctly expose both the foreground and the sky areas – hence the reason grad filters are often used – but with a HDR image, information in both areas will be captured.

Here’s an example of a shot I took on an assignment yesterday. The first image is a single correctly exposed image, whereas the second is a HDR of the same image. As you’ll see the difference is huge and the second has far more impact!

To try HDR photography you will ideally need a camera that has a bracketing function and the use of a tripod as obviously the camera needs to stay perfectly still whilst you take the multiple exposures. On the software side I would highly recommend using a program called Photomatix Pro to combine your images together. A free trial version is available to download from http://www.hdrsoft.com/

I’m looking forward to experimenting with HDR more and perhaps try and incorporate it into my wedding shoots.

I'm sure HDR will become more and more popular over the next couple of years as more people see the difference it can make to images, and I'm sure it won't be long before cameras have an automatic inbuilt HDR button function.

I’ll post more HDR shots soon!