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Main Street Pier at Sunrise

I’ve been driving to work all week and in the morning I’d see these fabulous columns of clouds reaching out of the horizon.  Alas I’d have to go to work and miss these beautiful images.  Saturday morning arrives and of course my body doesn’t know the meaning of sleeping in.  So…wide awake I become at 6:30am and I decide to pack my gear and go shoot some sunrise shots.

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Can you believe he sat still for multiple shots!

Blue is one of the coolest dogs you’ll ever know.  He’s well-behaved and likes small children.  The one thing I’m not a fan of is his drool or more specifically, his drool on my pants leg.  But I digress, he’s the subject of this photo-shoot.

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My brother had been asking me when we could go out and take pictures of his car.  He recently got it running and wanted to see it in some other backdrop other than the garage. So off we went in search of a location worthy of his ’64 Falcon.After our trip around town and surrounding areas, we returned home where I got to review the days photography.  All-in-all, I thought the take was fairly mediocre.  But after looking at the shots a couple of times, I just grabbed one and decided to see what an HDR process would do for it.  Here’s the original photo.

As you can see, it is kind of blah.  This particular shot was only taken once, no additional exposures were made with correct registration.  So, essentially just a single composed snapshot of my brother and car.  To get the finished HDR shot, I made virtual copies of the original (Note: I shoot in RAW only) and adjusted the exposure of each of the copies.  One copy was made +2EV and the other made -2EV.  In essence, I created three exposures with values of -2EV, metered, +2EV and all with perfect registration.  The drawback?  Well, depending on your camera and the dynamic range it can capture and store in a single RAW file  you may not get the proper highlight or shadow values in your under and over exposures.  One result may be areas of blocked highlights or shadows.  So you are probably wanting to see what went into this photo and how it came out.

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A good HDR image starts with a multiple exposures that are between 1 and 2 stops apart and most importantly have good registration.  Registration is probably the easiest to comprehend but the most difficult to achieve.

Image registration is the process of transforming the different sets of data into one coordinate system.

What this means, is that each detail found at their respective locations on one exposure must be in the same exact location on each of the additional exposures.  If registration is not achievable, your image will have a blurry appearance.  Good registration is achieved by using a good tripod that provides a solid foundation to eliminate all camera movement.

Once you’ve got the camera securely mounted, you must determine a good exposure starting point.  To do this, first determine what part of the image you want to be neutrally exposed.  From here, the next exposures will be made in equal increments both above and below the neutral starting point.  You can use any step size, however, exposure made between 1 and 2 stops above and below work best.  This can also be subject to change as determined by the scene to be shot.

Ok, you’ve taken your shots and their in RAW format, right?  Well…it’s not required but suggested.  When using a *.jpg image, you are bringing only 8-bits of data to the project.  When using RAW, you are bring 16-bits to the project.  An 8-bit image only has 256 shades of each color (red, green, blue) whereas 16-bits bring 65,535 shades of each color.  Now that we have that squared away, let’s move onto the next phase.  Creating a 32-bit image.  From my experience, to-date, I haven’t found much use for this image other than it being required as an intermediary step to creating the finished artwork.  That was easy, on to “tonemapping”.

Tonemapping

Because the amount of information that is in a 32-bit image is tremendous, it is not possible to view on today’s media, screen or paper.  Therefore, the information must be transposed in such a way that the deepest blacks and the brightest whites will all fit within the gamut of the available media.  Sounds complicated but it isn’t.  All of that transposing stuff is done behind the scenes leaving you to concentrate more on what the finished product will look like.  To do the entire HDR process, with exception of taking the pictures, I like software package Photomatix by HDRSoft.

Post-Processing

Once the image has passed your approval and gone through the final processing out of Photomatix you’ll have an image that looks like no other image you created before.  But wait, the image is a bit soft and needs some fine tuning.  Unless you like this look or it works for the subject of the image, I suggest doing a once over in Photoshop to add that finished touch that says, “hey look at me, see me roar!!!”.  Once in Photoshop, the sky’s the limit with what your creativity and photoshop skills can come up with.

Presentation

What good is art if no one is able to see it?  You need a plan to make it visible.  There are several ways to do this.  The easiest or cheapest way is to have a website of your own where you can display  your art.  Another online option is to use a photo gallery service that also offers services to sell prints of your work.  I’ve opted to use this option as it takes a lot of the heavy lifting out of my hands into my pocket.  There are several services like this out there but I’ve found Zenfolio to meet my needs.  And finally, the most difficult and expensive route to display your work but possible the most rewarding is to print and display your work at either an art gallery or even better at an art festival.

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