All text and images are provided courtesy of Royce Howland and are protected under copyright laws. I invite you to link to this article but please do not re-post the content without prior approval from Royce. A huge “thanks” to Royce for writing this article and allowing me to publish it here on my blog. As a side note, if you’ve ever wanted to photograph the Canadian Rockies in autumn you should definitely check out Royce’s “Fall 2010 Photo Tour“! Enjoy the article and be sure to leave your thoughts on HDR in the comments section.
I’m mainly a landscape photographer, and I’ve been using High Dynamic Range (HDR) techniques in my work for about 5 years now. During that time I’ve used HDR on many images. In fact, I’d venture to say that HDR has become nearly indispensable to my way of working. I don’t use it for everything, and it’s not the only tool in my toolbox, but it’s a very important part of my process.
I’ve done some thinking about HDR and photography, and written about it as well as discussed it with people. I’ve also read quite a bit written by others, both pro and con. It’s now clear to me that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who love HDR, and everyone else.
(Side note – okay, okay. Really, there are two kinds of people: those who think there are two kinds of people, and everyone else. But this is about HDR and photography, not some kind of social studies. And I needed a controversial-seeming opening line.)
Elliott Peak At First Light, White Goat Lakes
When I show my images or prints and disclose something about the part that HDR plays, those who know about digital photography or post-processing frequently have a reaction like “Wow, that doesn’t look like HDR, it looks natural!” Hmm. First, thanks very much – it’s a gratifying comment to receive. It’s my intention to present art, not artifice, and I don’t want my use of technique to be very front-and-center to the visual experience. The main point should be the image itself, not the processing.
But second, there’s something else going on with this interaction. Maybe there’s an implication that my images don’t look like HDR because HDR must look “unnatural”. Just maybe there’s a feeling that there’s a little something different to my images even though they still look kind of “normal”. There are definitely some assumptions about what a “natural” or “normal” photograph is. What’s up with this?
Perhaps a few of those who know that HDR exists and don’t love it simply don’t understand it the way I do. That’s right – HDR isn’t bad, it’s just misunderstood! I don’t want to try to convince anybody to adopt something they don’t need; but on the off chance there is room for clarification, I thought I would write something new about Why I Love HDR.
So what’s to love? I can sum it up in two phrases, five words: high fidelity capture and creative development.
High Fidelity Capture
The Sun Is Shining But the Ice Is Slippery, Preacher's Point
I don’t want to spend a ton of time on this part because it has been written about at length, by myself and others. However it does set the stage so I don’t want to gloss over it too quickly, either.
High fidelity capture is about the technical or craft part of the equation: one aspect of mastery of tools and techniques. Craft is interesting, and it’s an important part of things like achieving personal style, effectively interpreting subject material and presenting an engaging vision. Many photographers really gravitate to the craft aspect of photography. I suppose in part it’s because the tools and techniques are tangible, fun to debate, learnable by many avenues, and we can feel a sense of accomplishment in getting a grip on successive elements of the craft.
Thinking about the craft of digital photography, I remember a time not so long ago when a category of debates raged. Remember these? RAW vs. JPEG. Lossily compressed JPEG vs. lossless TIFF. 8-bit vs. 16-bit. Image layers vs. destructive image edits. sRGB vs. Adobe RGB vs. ProPhoto RGB. On and on they went, until they mostly just sort of died away; now we rarely read or engage in these arguments any more. Why? Because they are all arguments about fidelity and it has become more or less accepted that throwing away fidelity early in the digital image workflow isn’t that great an idea, as a rule.
Sure, there are cases where sacrificing fidelity is a trade-off that can – or perhaps must – be made. Photojournalists targeting deadline-driven distribution via low resolution print or web reproductions. Sports or event shooters ripping through massive volumes of frames and needing efficient workflows with rapid turn-around time. Travel photographers going for long periods of time without access to plentiful storage, electricity or bandwidth. But for those of us who are more like fine art landscape photographers working from home base, raise your hand if you still shoot 8-bit sRGB JPEG’s in the camera for your main work. Anyone? No, I didn’t really think so.
Okay, so with that set-up, consider an HDR image file – and I mean a real HDR image file. One with a file type like .hdr or .exr, not something that’s been rendered back down into a normal TIFF. Think of this HDR image like a RAW file on steroids. It sniffs at debates of bit levels, color space gamuts, or tone curves. It sneers at issues of dynamic range like clipped highlights or noisy, blocked shadows. An HDR file is something called a scene-referred image. At its best, it’s got all the contrast, every hint of detail, the full range of color of the original scene, all the way from the brightest highlights to the darkest shadows. In essence, it has all of the light. Photographers work with light – it’s the foundation of our medium. Doesn’t it sound appealing to have access to all of the light in a single, high fidelity capture? It does to me! My frustration with the dynamic range of digital capture some years ago is precisely what first prompted me to try HDR when I first discovered it.
Are there limitations? Yes, you bet. They come up largely because for most of us, currently, HDR is a bolt-on to traditional digital photography with cameras that aren’t actually designed for HDR. (“Traditional digital photography” – there’s a generational statement!) We HDR shooters typically take a bunch of exposure-bracketed frames and merge them using software on a computer. Some cameras coming on the market recently (notably from Pentax) are starting to push HDR functions into the camera, but so far they’re still based on taking multiple exposures and somehow merging them after the fact. Merging exposures brings the same kind of problems as with any frame blending technique – moving camera or moving subject elements in the scene. Motion over time leads to the need to develop image alignment & morphing approaches, ghost removal retouching tools, that kind of thing. These are time consuming, sometimes don’t work well, and can’t solve everything even when they do work.
But trust me, this will change – in fact it is changing. Digital photography is photography, and so many of the hallmarks of the last century or more of the practice still apply. But it’s also digital, and that means profound advances in photographic capability are happening extremely fast compared to what went before. A digital camera is in large part a computer running software; things that only can be done on a desktop computer today might be done in the camera tomorrow. There are native HDR capture cameras already in existence that can capture HDR files without shooting separate exposures and then merging them. These cameras are specialized, expensive and limited in ways that make them unsuitable for most of us. But more R&D is going on and I believe we’ll have affordable, useful, native HDR capture cameras well before I’m too feeble and broke to use them. (Knock wood!)
Summing Up
Fresh Snow in Bright Sun 2, Mistaya Canyon
Okay, I’ve covered this part of the topic for the moment. Let me sum up. Regardless of how I get an HDR file, what I end up with is a high fidelity capture of the light on the scene. It has some nice characteristics that I can’t get easily (or at all) any other way for certain kinds of scenes – all the detail, all the color, all the dynamic range, none of the noise. That sounds great, almost like a TV commercial! There are limits, many related to motion; but in situations where those limits aren’t a factor, a new kind of master image file is there for the taking.
I love having this kind of high fidelity master, both as a point of philosophy and practicality. But such images, and the processing techniques that produce them, are mainly about craft. It isn’t sufficient to stop there because I haven’t really done anything yet in terms of my intent to realize the final image. As Ansel Adams said in one of his most commonly quoted statements, “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” Having taken a high fidelity capture, going on to the next stage – creative development – is where the real action is for my image-making. And I think that’s also mostly where those who don’t love HDR are getting hung up.
So that’s the real big question – I’ve got a high fidelity capture, now what do I do with it? Stay tuned for part 2, where I’ll address creative development.
About Royce:
By day a mild-mannered IT consultant, Royce Howland is also a photographer based in Calgary, Alberta. Initially drawn to photograph birds and wildlife through his experiences as a birder, Royce became increasingly focused on turning his lens on the land itself. He loves exploring the rich array of photographic opportunities in his home region of the Canadian West, as well as travel destinations including the American Southwest and England. He is a member of the editorial team at NatureScapes.Net, and contributes photos and articles to various online and print publications. For more information, visit http://www.vividaspectphoto.com/.
20 Responses to “Guest Post: Why I Love HDR – Part 1 by Royce Howland”
Gary Crabbe / Enlightened Images says:
Great article. While not doing very much HDR myself, I enjoyed his term ‘high-fidelity’ version, and the much more natural representation of the scene; in contrast to the “absurd-fidelity” versions I see across sites like Flickr.
Bret Edge says:
Thanks for the comment, Gary. I’ve seen a lot of HDR landscape photography and I think Royce does some of the very best out there. His work is very natural looking, and just amazing all-around. I know it’s personal preference but I’m not a fan of the typical HDR photography so ubiquitous these days. Definitely stand to learn a thing or ten from Royce!
Greg Russell says:
Bret, I couldn’t agree more that Royce’s work is some of the very best out there. I’ve long admired the work he puts into his HDR images to make them true to the scene. Every image seems to be crafted with extreme care, which is something I could do more of myself.
As a member of the Church of Howland, I am a firm believer in HDR techniques, whether they be traditional tone mapping of an .hdr image file, or manual blending to increase dynamic range, or even using the Exposure Fusion method in Photomatix. I think they’re all valuable tools that, when utilized properly, can be a valuable asset to a photographer’s toolbox.
I do have one question for Royce, though. What Wailin’ Jennys album would he recommend for a newbie?
Royce Howland says:
Thanks guys! Bret, it’s a pleasure to have a guest slot here. I’ve been looking forward to doing this series for awhile. I hope readers will enjoy it.
Gary, great point to emphasize, which I will take up further as I move into the rest of the series. I fully support anybody’s personal style choices; photography is and should be a very democratic art form, in my view. But for me part of fidelity is trying to ensure that the processing and other stylistic choices I make don’t hijack the image. The best photos are evocative — hopefully what they evoke is not just a viewer’s awareness of my technique.
I use the technique because it offers me something as the image maker, but at the same time I don’t want to really get off-side with the viewer’s expectations.
Greg, you also are getting at a key point I’ll be developing. Successes and flaws alike, my images look more the way I make them look, less the way a lens, camera, or software makes them look. HDR technique is a dual process, with both parts often lumped together in discussion but each of which is distinct and has a separate purpose. HDR’s high fidelity capture is about getting a clean master image that is faithful to the light on the scene, and this is where it steps away in philosophy from other multi-exposure techniques that don’t actually create that hi-fi master. What I do with it after that is where I put my subjective, interpretive stamp on it, and that’s the interesting part.
As for the Wailin’ Jennys I like all their albums. But an awesome starting point would be Live At The Mauch Chunk Opera House. What a great name, and what a great set of tracks.
Indranil Sinharoy says:
Great article Royce. Your photographs are very beautiful. I am looking forward to the “creative part” in this series. The best part of the above article (in my opinion) is “…It’s my intention to present art, not artifice, and I don’t want my use of technique to be very front-and-center to the visual experience. The main point should be the image itself, not the processing.” And I religiously agree with you on this. HDR (manual or automated), ND-filter, etc are just the craftsman’s tools and a skilled and experienced craftsman uses his/her tools judiciously, as required. Most of these tools were created in order to surpass the limitations of the “conventional” camera and they allow the photographer to successfully realize his/her vision.
Ray Beair says:
From time to time, we see turning points in technology acceptance. I personally believe that Royce’s take on HDR could be one of those points. Having read part 1 of his discussion, I find great wisdom in presenting HDR by the term “High Fidelity Capture.” It is descriptive in a way that “HDR” alone is not. As a relative newcomer to the field of post processing, I was fortunate to understand how HDR, when used conservatively, offers me another tool that is useful in my attempts to express (through my prints) what I see on location.
Like Royce, I realize there are times when this technique will not give me an advantage, thereby giving me ample opportunity to hone my other skills as a photographer. Certainly, the static scene benefits most from this technique today, but I expect that will soon change as our cameras do benefit from becoming a field computer as well. When I read the negative comments about HDR, I’m always struck by how one-sided, opinionated, even narrow-minded these comments often are. I then find myself wondering if the comments would be the same had the writer simply stood in an exhibition and listened to the public comment about an obvious HDR processed image as opposed to the image processed with a more conservative HDR technique that allows for “high fidelity.”
Do we have room for both techniques? Of course, and we should have both. But what a wonderful world it would be if the naysayers simply stepped back and enjoyed how this new technology is developing. I’d suggest they start with a visit to these words of wisdom presented by Royce Howland. I for one, will be looking forward to much more of what Royce offers on this topic.
Michael E. Gordon says:
Great article and beautiful images, Royce. I especially appreciate the humor component; photography writing is often too serious!
I don’t practive “modern” HDR as film is my fine art medium, but I’ve been practicing “traditional” HDR for many years: negative film
I look forward to reading Part 2!
Teresa says:
I like it! Your explanation is exactly how I think of HDR. OTOH, I only just got hold of HDR software and I’m pretty awful at using it so far. But I’m working on it. It all takes time and practice (time being the element in incredibly short supply lately). I love the detail HDR brings out, now I have to figure out how to tone it down a bit. Looking forward to your next article.
Royce Howland says:
Thanks for the added feedback!
Ray: The terms “high dynamic range” or “high dynamic range imaging” have been used for this technique for a long time. But I’ve thought for awhile they don’t capture the main point for me. For example, I sometimes use HDR technique in low-contrast situations — situations where there is no “high dynamic range” going on. What’s the point, then? The point is getting a high fidelity capture of whatever light there is. So I’m using that description a lot these days, and people seem to think it makes sense.
I like your take with phrases like “obvious HDR”, “conservative HDR”, etc. These show that HDR can render different stylistic results. HDR itself is not anything other than what the individual makes of it. Yet some detractors will lump everything together and conclude “because I don’t like many HDR images, the whole technique must be useless or bad”. That’s like saying “because many Instamatic snapshots are boring, over-exposed and irrelevant to me, all 35mm photography is pointless and non-artistic”! A tool is not bad because people use it to do things I don’t like or care about.
I believe HDR is going to keep coming on, and getting better and more ubiquitous. (Already there are more people using it than some think, because not all HDR looks like people think HDR has to look.) But what will also change is our collective understanding and maturity in using the technique to produce our work. Also, people will produce new kinds of work that uniquely take advantage of the technique, rather than just seeking to reproduce images that look like traditional photographs — just because photographs have had certain looks for a long time doesn’t make that either right or necessary for all photography in the future.
Note that I reserve “high fidelity” for the captured image — the super RAW file if you like. I don’t claim my final end-state, my processed images, are high fidelity. Though I do claim they are conservative and relatively photorealistic in a traditional way, that’s not the same as being high fidelity to the original scene. The purpose of art is to subjectively interpret reality through the experience and vision of the artist, not to be perfectly true to reality.
This is why I’m always very careful to keep the dual nature of HDR — high fidelity capture and creative development — in the discussion. Failing to do so has caused a lot of confusion. People call things HDR that aren’t, they claim that HDR couldn’t benefit them because they don’t like the final look that some HDR practitioners achieve, they confuse what is going on between capture and development. (Think of the Adams quote — take vs. make.) The high fidelity part is about capturing a master image, a reference, that is faithful to the light on the scene. What I do after that in creative development is up to me, and that’s what I’ll cover starting in part 2.
Side note: There are some HDR practitioners that don’t do any creative development. E.g. museums & archives who create HDR master files from documents and works of art that are at risk of degrading & being lost. These folks capture the HDR master file and stop there, because they truly want nothing other than a high fidelity capture of the source. Another good application for the technique.
Michael: Negative film — chemical HDR.
Early digital was a setback in some ways. But the advantage of digital (and partly a curse as well) is the tremendous pace of advancements. We’ve caught up in some areas, are catching up in others. And of course, some areas will surpass. That doesn’t render any judgments about how useful any component of the craft is to photographers and artists… we will create using whatever we like. 
Teresa: Much HDR software is still somewhat immature at this point, from a photography viewpoint. It is too technical, not designed to produce qualitative results that photographers care about. You have to take some blind alleys, try different things, “go by the numbers” and make a few leaps of faith, all the while trying to reverse engineer how to drive the software to produce the effects you’re after. The tools will get better and more intuitive.
I use Photomatix heavily; it’s one of the earliest and most popular HDR tools out there, and it’s still my workhorse. I consider it 2nd generation (where first generation were really fairly user unfriendly tools developed in labs for seriously technically inclined imaging types). 3rd generation tools are now coming available from companies like Unified Color and Oloneo. I believe we’re going to see even cooler stuff over the next while — much easier to use, focusing on qualitative results (not technical algorithms), and providing way more interesting capabilities that really stretch the boundaries of what we can do as image makers. Exciting times!
Bret Edge says:
Wow, there has been some fantastic discussion on this post! Thanks to everyone who has commented. I’ve enjoyed reading your thoughts as much as I enjoyed Royce’s article. Keep ‘em coming!
Royce Howland says:
Indranil: Absolutely! I couldn’t agree more. The creative image is the end result of a flow of work with any number of tools that, ideally, all blend together seamlessly to achieve something that is whole and stands on its own. The camera is one tool, but I use other tools as well because the camera by itself has limitations that I need to exceed to achieve the images I want to make…
Robert says:
Every example you show on this article, could have been done with a single exposure, using a split neutral density filter …
Bret Edge says:
Hey Robert – You’re absolutely right. A GND filter could have been used for any of them but Royce chose to use a different tool and personally, I think he made the right choice. My issue with GND’s is that they are less than precise in all but a few situations. For example, in any of these photos there are trees projecting into the area that would have been at least partially covered by the dark half of the GND filter. One would either have to live with the fact that the tops of the trees are darker than the bottoms, or fix it in post. I still use GND’s in the field. I also do manual blends when I’ve got the time and energy to sit at the computer. As soon as the Nik HDR Efex Pro is available I’ll spend some time with it. If I’m happy with the results, I’ll most likely pack away my GND’s for good. If not, I’ll keep doing what I’m doing until the next generation of technology arrives.
Thanks for taking the time to read the post and leave a comment. I always enjoy hearing from both sides of the fence!
Royce Howland says:
Hey Robert, cool! Thanks for the input. I like that response because it relates directly to one of the background reasons I started this article series. Namely, the way I use HDR doesn’t necessarily look like anything people aren’t used to seeing in photographs, at least initially anyway. So I take part of your input as “hey, what’s the big deal? These photos look kinda normal.”
But there is something going on. I’d caution against making a lot of different statements about an image based only on a small web JPEG. There are some less obvious features that would be more clear if I showed before & after, or the processing steps I took, or a comparison to an “equivalent” image done with GND’s, or a high res master image, or a sizable print.
I called this article series “Why I Love HDR” because I’m going to try to show the reasons that HDR can be useful to photographers who may have stylistic goals like mine. This article is not called “Why I Don’t Love the GND”, or “Why I Shoot Large Format Film”, or any of a number of other possibilities. Many artists develop a style that reinforces them to adopt & adapt certain tools & techniques for certain reasons. Nobody would say to a watercolor painter, “that painting could have been done with acrylics” because the craft of paint choice isn’t really the main point about most artwork. But you can sure bet a watercolor painter has reasons to believe that watercolors are more suitable for much of the type of work they do, and that’s why they chose that option. For me, what I often call in shorthand “photorealistic HDR” is a key part of my style. GND’s don’t enter the conversation because that’s not my choice, but I could write volumes about it.
Plus, “photorealistic” is an oversimplification because I believe the very concept of “photorealism” is being challenged by digital.
Here’s something else to consider. A person could say “that photo could have been made with a GND” or “I could have taken that on my Wista 4×5″ or “my web JPEG’s shot on an iPhone look just as good”. All of those other photos may be perfectly acceptable to their creators, but would they be the same as ones I did with HDR technique? No, they will be different. Those differences may be subtle or they may be large, but they will be there when the viewing conditions bring them to light.
Bret has already touched on one major difference that HDR has over using a GND, and it plays out in the 3rd example image above. That’s the fact that reality does not fit into a pair of stacked rectangles with a straight line separating them. In the 3rd image (snow drifts, trees, mountains and clouds), the brightest area of the scene actually is just above center frame — and that’s after I cropped off the top to achieve a 4×5 aspect ratio. The brightest area isn’t the sky above the ridgeline, it’s a patch of new snow glaring in a region of light that breaks through the heavy cloud cover. To use a GND on this scene to control blown highlights, I’d have had to drop the dark region of the filter right down into or below middle frame. This would substantially darken the whole upper part of the scene, blocking up the details in the trees and making the clouds look more stormy than they do here. Could I do some reverse processing to try to undo those effects? Perhaps. But I don’t need to because in this case HDR lets me tackle the tonal range across frame without trying to force it into a pair of stacked rectangular areas.
There are several other differences that each of these 3 examples illustrate, and I could come up with many more example images that a GND would be hopeless at addressing whereas HDR would take them in stride. Rather than do that just now, I’ll wrap up this lengthy reply with a question to whomever is still reading here.
Based on nothing other than the small JPEG’s and what you know about HDR, can anybody venture some other benefits that HDR may bring to these specific images that a GND would not necessarily bring?
Alan Schietzsch says:
On the question posed, there’s certainly a very significant difference between an HDR and a GND interpretation of the scene: the geometry of a given scene limits the placement of a GND’s transition.
For the snow image, a ‘horizon’ placement of the grad would limit the light from the brightest part of the scene, the snow. As it should, that’s the goal. But it would then also block light from the dark trees, exactly where the least information exists. That would be the worst possible place to lose from the capture. So thats a scene where GND would not be able to compete with HDR.
There’s no orientation of the filter that could avoid that issue, whereas the previous image would suffer less, so would be more amenable to a GND approach.
Royce Howland says:
Right on, Al. Good to see you here by the way.
Here are a couple of additional points where HDR offers some advantages that may not be obvious.
First, we’ve already talked about the limited geometry of the grad ND filter. Extrapolate that idea further, but not in terms of the 2-dimensional layout of the frame, rather the irregular array of light over the original 3-dimension scene. A GND adjusts (or leaves alone) all light equally in its two respective regions, setting aside the hard or soft transition area. But the source scene’s light is not evenly distributed in those areas into spaces that should be all adjusted vs. all left alone — highlights, midtones and shadows may be found anywhere. Placement of those tones may or may not be something we want to do with a really broad brush stroke.
So ultimately the limitation of the GND is not just that horizon lines are not flat. Rather it’s that the GND doesn’t really refer to the light on the scene to make its adjustments, it just blindly does what it does in big rectangular blocks. Whereas the whole point of HDR is that it is what we call a scene-referred image — it accurately maps all the light on the scene, whatever and wherever it is, at every pixel of the image. From there the light can be developed accordingly with as much or as little control as one desires. That’s a pretty fundamental conceptual difference, though of course the pragmatic reality in a lot of useful cases may be that a GND is acceptable.
Another less obvious result is what HDR brings in the shadow regions. We typically think of GND’s as a way to tame the highlights, stopping them from blowing to detail-less white. But what about shadows, which are an equally pernicious but different sort of problem area in digital capture? Shadow regions suffer from low signal-to-noise ratio, which contributes to digital noise. Shadows also can suffer from reduced tonal resolution, because the sensor’s distribution of recorded light levels is much reduced down there. These two issues can make themselves felt well before the sensor fully clips to black, whereas on the highlight side of the equation you don’t have to worry about ramping noise and loss of tonal resolution.
What does a GND bring to the shadows? The answer is not much, in & of itself. Typically photographers will use the minimal amount of GND necessary to control major highlights (e.g. in the sky) while leaving the rest of the scene at a more or less normal exposure value. This means the shadows are essentially normal shadows. “Normal” may not be good enough, if noise and loss of tonality are factors down there. HDR technique, because it samples from a much wider range of under- to over-exposed sources, can construct the shadow tones out of the upper ranges of recorded sensor info, where signal-to-noise ratio is better and tonal resolution is broader. We get less noise and better detail, but accurately mapped back into the proper shadows zones. This effect plays out in all 3 images above, where there are significant shadow tone regions. In the high res images or in decent sized prints, these areas show a clean level of detail and microcontrast that can be difficult to achieve otherwise, at least without a ton of work in manual exposure blending. Not obvious in a small JPEG, but it’s an effect I see all the time.
A final characteristic that HDR can bring to the table relates to color. Modern digital cameras can record a range of color that surprise some people who still think we live in a digital world dominated by sRGB. Digital cameras often have a gamut that exceeds traditional photo printing and are a better match for the gamut of modern inkjet printing for example; perhaps even exceeding inkjets in certain hues. But when taking photos in challenging light with wide dynamic range, certain color channels may clip much earlier than others, without the photographer realizing it and being able to do anything meaningful about it. This can lead to loss of detail in those colourful highlights by compressing bright shades together due to the clipped channel.
If “exposing to the right” using a blended histogram on the back of the camera, a photographer may think the exposure looks good via a GND because the histogram doesn’t appear clipped. In reality, perhaps the top end of the red or blue is clipped and some color detail is being lost up there. If the channel clipping is observed using a histogram display that splits out the RGB channels, the choice is to underexpose, possibly leading to more issues in the darker tones (see above). Again, because HDR can sample every pixel from a broad range of under- to over-exposed input images, the master image that results can preserve both full color gamut and subtle shades in those bright areas, without negatively impacting any other zones. Like the tiny patch of alpenglow on the mountain top in the first image. This kind of color grace note may be hard to notice, perhaps even hard to reproduce depending on the output choices. But HDR can offer something there, and if one is going to be obsessive about fidelity, might as well go for broke!
Andy Richards says:
Brett: Thanks so much for doing this!! Royce’s post and follow up comments really resonate with me.
I have been looking at, thinking about, and experimenting with HDR for a couple years now. Before that, I was trying to work with layers, painting masks, etc.
I have an image I took in New Mexico on Velvia slide film back in the early 1990’s that I think about EVERY time this topic comes up. It was a high contrast scene with bright blue skies above a redrock formation with a road leading into the foreground. Compositionally a wonderful photograph. I used a 2 stop graduated ND filter. No matter where I placed it, I could not get the transition between the sky and mountain tops right.
I agree that it is a matter of personal style and that some folks will continue to shoot with film, some will continue to use traditional filters and techniques that arose because of the limitations of film. Some are very very good at them. I have thought digitally for a long time and HDR just appeals to my own personal taste and style.
Marichal Claude says:
Paysages fantastiques,merci.