What is HDR photography?

You might have heard of HDR photography.

Then you wondered, what is it? What does that mean?

Why are you asking me? I'm not an expert. I've done a whole two pictures in this technique.

Would you settle for a layperson explanation? Too bad, your are gonna have to settle.

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. Have you ever noticed that if you take a picture of something that is both very dark and very bright that the picture doesn't show the detail that your eye saw at the time?

In photography light is measured in "stops" of light. Your eye sees about 16 stops of light. The best camera on the market sees only about 6-7 stops. Lot of loss there, huh?

So, to get a good full range, you slap that camera on the tripod and take the same picture a bunch of times.

BUT...you expose each picture at a different stop of light, some overexposed to get the highlights:





and underexposed to get shadow detail and deep colors:





As well as a normal exposure:



You can see how each picture has a little bit of detail in certain areas that the other does not. As well as way over/under exposed parts, but that's what software is for, to weed out the unwanted. Now, if they only made software to weed out other dim bulbs in my life....

You can take as few as 2 and as many as say, 9 pictures. I did five for this one as you can see.

It's called bracketing. Most DSLRs have this feature built in, but it's not hard to do if it doesnt. You just shoot as described, a few overexposed and a few underexposed.

After the shots, you let the software do the heavy lifting. Photoshop will do the trick just fine, though there are dedicated programs out there just for this technique.

Then after a bit of further post processing to sharpen, add contrast and bring out the colors a bit you get something like this:



Or this:



Of course these aren't the best examples out there, but you get the idea. It's a great way to finally get that picture that your eye saw and your camera couldn't capture!