18 March 2013

Time to try HDR

Custom House Door

HDR, a set on Flickr.
So, I decided to give high dynamic range (HDR) photography a try. HDR is the Marmite of the photography world: people seem to like it or hate it. I am somewhere in the middle in that I like some HDR.

Like a lot of people, I dislike the cartoony, un-natural looking photos that often characterize HDR. Many call these photos too "cartoony". These photos do not look natural nor are they what your eye sees.

To me, the goal of HDR is to produce a photo that represents what your eye sees. The human eye can see a wider range of light than any camera sensor can. By combining different exposures of the same scene the photographer can try to duplicate the subject as they saw it.

So, I have been trying out some processing in HDR with the goal of "keeping it real".