HDR - a simple walk through

HDR... tremble, quake. Have you heard of it? It sounds terribly complicated and most beginner photographers I know think this is something far beyond them. Google it and you will find out all about dynamic ranges, optics, RGB, CMYK, computer algorithms and a hundred other big poncy words. Look at the images - some are stunning, most are just plain wierd and apocolyptic looking, overly saturated and almost cartoonised.

HDR is one of my favourite techniques, but it gets a lot of bad press for being "cheating" and is often rediculously overdone. Actually anyone can do it with any digital camera and it is really easy! Here is my quick guide to doing it.

First of all, how does it work,... actually I don't care. If you do, then feel free to bore yourself for hours on the internet without getting any better images. It is NOT a cure all for a lack of talent or patience. In fact to get a good quality HDR image, you really need to be extra careful about composition as you are drawing attention to everything in the image.

So why use it? Very basically, a camera cannot differentiate shadows and highlights like the human eye can, using HDR letes you show up all the detail you could actually see, without worrying about the limitations of your camera. It lets you make very detailed images, correctly exposed at all areas of the image and with as rich or pale colours as you like. Use it when you have no access to filters and there is a strong difference in light between the brightest and darkest parts of the image. The main use is in landscapes.

How do you do it? OK forget all the techy explanations you saw when you were boring yourself on the internet earlier. This is how to do it. Set up your camera on a tripod. You are going to take multiple pictures but the camera MUST not move at all between images. Not even a tiny bit. There's no getting round it, you need tripod and preferably zero to no wind.

1. Set up the tripod, compose your image carefully, everything will be visible in the final image so pay attention to everything in the frame, whether it is shadow or not.
2. Set a small aperture and focus close by (perhaps even use hyperfocal depth of field). You want everything to be adequately in focus.
3. Expose for the mid tones or just let the camera automatically set the exposure
4. Lock your exposure and focal setting (you could just use manual for this)
5. Digital camears wil allow you to adjust the exposure by 1/3rd of a stop increments to a maximum of 2 stops dark and 2 stops light This is normally represented as the bar across the botton of the viewfinder that looks like \...\...\...\...\...\...\ and is called exposure compensation (look up you camera manual if this is news to you). Set the camera to the darkest of these settings and take the image. It will be pretty black but the brightest highlights will have been captured without being burned out.
6. Do NOT move the camera or tripod, but adjust the exposure compensation brighter by 2/3rds of a stop and retake.
7. Repeat this until you are at the brightest setting and everything is burnt out except the darkest shadows, which should now be exposed well.
8. You should now have 6 or 7 images of varying exposures. Load them to your PC.
9. Now you need to use some special but fairly cheap HDR software. I have found Photomatix to be very easy to use. Load all 7 exposures to the software where they will be blended.

You can adjust the relative exposures and contrasts in the software. My tip is to try to make things look natural, do not overdo it or it will be painfully obvious.

That's it you now have an image where EVERY element is exposed correctly, he colours will be fairly rich and you should have a high impact image. Import it to photoshop to carry out any fine tuning, cloning, dodging and burning as necessary, like you would with any image. What makes a great HDR image? Well each to their own, but here is one I think is not overdone but I just could not have done without this technique.

Also remember that while most HDR's tend to be supersaturated, this image technique can be used with muted colours and even mono's - it's about the exposures, not the colours.

It's also a lot of fun - go on, get a free trial of some HDR software and have a go!