366 Days of 2012, Day 121 - The Square

I have been resisting the temptation for quite some time now to play with High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging. Tonight in a moment of weakness I finally succumbed, found a nice quiet dark location and captured multiple exposures.

For the uninitiated, the naive and the innocent, HDR is a technique where a set of identical frames are captured over a wide exposure range. The underexposed images capture bright objects such as streetlights, lit windows and reflections. The overexposed images capture the the detail in the shadows. The images in between help to reconstruct the relationship between them all and enhance the details in the mid tones.

Now armed with my set of exposures ranging from 2 seconds to 2 minutes I can use software to reconstruct a single image by getting the best detail from each one. Trey Ratcliff has a great tutorial here 'hdr tutorial'.

As with most things, good things in moderation and so it applies to HDR. I can see how it could get out of hand so for now I'll just dabble a little and see where this goes.


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 121 - The Square'. 2+8+30+120 secs at 17mm f/11.0, ISO 1000 hdr