HDR Photography

I've just been learning about HDR photography. Great stuff. Here's my first image. You can read all about it online. But here it is in a nutshell.

Film and digital photography are not as sensitive to light as your eye. If you expose for bright spots your dark areas will be too dark to discern the details. If you expose for the dark areas, the bright spots will be "blown out" or in other words, just white areas lacking detail.

HDR photography merges the best of three or more images together through software. I'm using Photomatix Pro. (Just the demo version that's why you see their watermarks in the images.) You can take the three images yourself (one under exposed, another with the proper exposure, and the third over exposed) and merge them together. Or you can take a single RAW digital image and make the three or more exposures. You can only do this with RAW since it has recorded all the details of dark and light areas in the image. Therefore it can render properly the under/over/proper exposure.

I took one of my existing RAW images (I only took RAW when traveling China) and created the HDR images.

Check out the Longji village home and the Cloisinne factory above. We visited this factory while in China just after the Great Wall trip. (Click on the images for full screen images.)

Here is a favorite image of a friend of mine.

...dave
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera. -Dorthea Lange