Throughout my years photo class, I have attempted to perfect the “art” of High Dynamic Range Photography. I have tried, slightly unsuccessfully, to master this, and eventually gave up. But recently, with the release of HDR Pro in Photoshop CS5, I decided to give it a final try, for my final project — it seemed like a “final” thing to do.

For my first project this year, I tried HDR, and for my final, I am also attempting the style.

I have had multiple sources of inspiration for this project (as well as in the past), as there are many photographers who like this effect. I do realize that it is way overused, and overdone. But I wanted to give it a try for myself, and do it correctly.

I made a valid attempt, when editing my photos to make the images not over edited, but still look like the effect, but unfortunately some only looked good slightly overdone, so I think that I overdid a few.

What is HDR?

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. It is an “effect” when multiple exposures are combined together so that all parts of the image are exposed correctly, and there are no blown highlights, or dark shadows. When combining the exposures on the computer, many people choose to give the images a really contrasty look.

Here is a definition from Wikipedia that explains it:

In image processing, computer graphics, and photography, high dynamic range imaging (HDRI or just HDR) is a set of techniques that allow a greater dynamic range of luminances between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than standard digital imaging techniques or photographic methods.

The Project

Our photo class, for our final project in Advanced Photography, was to shoot 8-12 images that have something in common. This allows for a lot of freedom in the creativity department, so as a result, most of us chose different topics.

Personally, I chose to do mine on HDR, as I felt that it would demonstrate what I have learned throughout the year. Lastly, this is the last photo project that I will do in High School (the last project for all classes as well), so I thought that I would make it epic.

The Images

Below are the eight images I chose as my final images for the project. They were shot in downtown Spokane, Washington (shown below on the map).

This image was taken in an alley in Spokane. As I walked by, I saw this guy smoking in the alley, and I thought that it would add something to the image to have a subject in the image. I stood around the corner, set up my camera, put it on a tripod, and then moved it around the corner and fired off three quick exposures using the Auto Exposure Bracketing feature on my camera.

Exposure Information:

• Aperture: f/5.6
• ISO: 100
• Shutters: 1/60, 1/250, & 1/15 of a second

Below are the three exposures before I combined them:

In order, these images are EV -2, 0, +2.

Processing

With these images, I put them into photoshops new plugin “HDR Pro.”

From there, there are many options and sliders. I tended to keep it on the “Photorealistic” side of things, as they have some pretty crazy options, including “Surreal” and “Monochrome.” Below are some examples of other types of editing.

Next are some more images that I did for the project, to get more practice in the style of HDR.

The editing process was slightly different for each image, but the start was the same for each, which involved the conversion to 16bit HDR.

This image was actually the least amount of editing, but the HDR effect is visible in that every aspect of the photo is exposed properly, even the relatively bright sky. So other than HDR and a little bit of Unsharp Mask, there is nearly no editing. I like this, as it demonstrates one of the important parts of HDR. Most people see HDR as the over-edited imaging, but it also serves the purpose of having no blown highlights.

In this image, I desaturated most of the background slightly, and gave it a hint of brown. This goes with my sub-theme of urban decay, as it really is a color that I think of with urban decay.

This image, unfortunately, was slightly over-edited, but at the same time, it has a cool look when blown up. So thats why I chose to do it that way.

This image is kind of cool as it shows the motion of the biker crossing the street. As there are three exposures involved in HDR photography (you can do more if you want), motion will look “ghosted.” Photoshop has an option to auto-correct this, but I thought it demonstrated motion, and looked cool, so I kept it.

This image, the one at the top of this post, is one of my favorites, as it has really cool colors (or lack of colors), and the editing is pretty good, so this is one of my favorites.

Below is a contact sheet including the images used in this project:

Inspiration

As stated earlier, there has been a lot of inspiration for this project, including my past projects, but here are some images that I looked at for reference, and inspiration for this project.

INTO THE ABYSS, by hotpasta on DPChallenge. This image incorporates many cool aspects of HDR, including beautifully saturated colors, and an urban decay look, which is tied for first on most used subject matters for HDR.

Exposure Fusion on Digital Photography School. This is an article explaining the various techniques of HDR and what it means to photographers.

Any of the “interesting” HDR photos on Flickr. When on Flickr, you can’t browse without seeing at least 100 HDR photos. This is just one example of how it is insanely overused, but still, it is a really cool effect, and I wanted to try it.

View these images in the gallery

I have created a gallery in Bridge to show my images in style.

Google Map