This week's theme for my personal photography project, the Pet Photography 52 Weeks Challenge is "High Dynamic Range". Today's cameras are amazing, but they can never match the human eye. A camera can’t adjust for shadows and highlights in the same scene. In a high contrast scene, one with both bright light and shadows, it's impossible to expose correctly for both. You either must leave some shadows in the the dark, or risk "blowing out" your highlights into white areas of your image that contain no detail whatsoever.
Luckily there's a way around that and it's called HDR photography, or high dynamic range. HDR photography solves the dilemma of what to expose for, the shadows or the highlights, by merging several exposures together to expose for them both. With HDR photography you can have your cake and eat it too! HDR reveals details lost in the shadows or highlights of a single shot by merging several images, all taken at different exposures, together into a single image.
Below is a typical example of an HDR image; part of the scene is shaded, part is lit by the sun, so there's high contrast yet the image is perfectly exposed throughout.
Piazza Navona - Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
2 Comments
Jun 15, 2018, 9:26:58 AM
Shae - Great idea to use the exposures in the software- Such a great picture!
Jun 15, 2018, 8:52:16 AM
Uly - Pretty clever! Nice!