I was asked today how did I take the above image. At a first glance you can see there is something special about it, but you can’t quite put your finger on it.  Is it the colours?  Is it the detail in the image?

Actually its a bit of both. 

A problem with digital cameras compared to traditional silver halide is the reduced dynamic range, or in other words the range of brightness and darkness which can be captured by your camera. In fact, with the smaller, funkier more compact cameras the problem is even more pronounced!!

Before you read on, have a look at some of the photos you have taken recently and examine them more closely.  In particular, look at the brightest and darkest parts of the photo. You will notice for example that the sky is completely burnt out or white and any detail has been lost forever.

This is where the HDR technique comes into play. The trick is to take a photo so that the bright parts such as the sky still contains detail and at the same time the foreground or subject is not unacceptably dark.  How is this possible with a single photo you ask?  Well, simple answer is... its not!

For the above image I actually used a tripod to take 5 photos of varying exposure +/- 2 stops either way.  In layman’s terms, I took photos of the same thing but changed the shutter speed faster or slower each time. The resulting images should be a range of differing brightness so you will have one that is too dark except for a pretty sky, all the way to one that is very bright where you can see everything in the shadows. You may have done this in the past accidently when your camera settings are not set right. Your camera you may actually have a feature which will do this for you called “bracketing”.

With your images in hand, now the trick is to take the sky from the darker photos, and the shadow details from the brighter photos and blend them together into a single photo.  This is where some handy tools such as photoshop come into play.  A little bit of further research in should get you on the way. Personally, I used the following plug-in based on open source projects.

Yes it is a lot more work to get a single photo, and I would only use it when what I am photographing is relatively still and I have the time to set up and plan the shoot. But if you are committed, you can end up with splendid results.