MikeScone
Mike - Camera Corner Mod
We had a snowstorm yesterday, and when I woke up this morning the sun was shining brightly and everything was covered by a fresh coat of snow. I grabbed the camera, and took this shot out my bedroom window:
One of the problems with taking this sort of picture is that the "dynamic range" - the range of light levels in the picture from the glaring white of the snow on the pine tree through the black of the tree trunks - is much wider than the camera's image sensor can handle. If you expose for the snow, then you lose all of the shadow detail. Expose for the shadows, and all the snow gets blown out to featureless white. So, the camera has to pick a compromise exposure, which gets most of the levels right - but the brightest snow on the tree is all white and the shadows are inky black.
With film, that was all you could do. However, digital photography gives us another option - by shooting a number of pictures at a range of exposures, and then combining them in the processing software, you can get an image with a much larger dynamic range. The techy term for that is "HDR", for "High Dynamic Range".
This sort of image is perfect for that kind of manipulation. So, I tried taking five pictures at one f-stop intervals - two stops underexposed, one stop under, "normal" exposure, one stop overexposed and two stops over - and then used Photoshop's "Merge to HDR" function to merge them all into one HDR. There are lots of different adjustments and presets in the function - my favorites were the basic HDR, "Saturated", "Surrealistic Artistic" and "Monochrome".
This is the basic HDR image:
Saturated (emphasizes color):
Surrealistic Artistic (high contrast and exaggerated color):
Monochrome:
It's not something I'd do every day or to every image, but HDR can give you some interesting results.
One of the problems with taking this sort of picture is that the "dynamic range" - the range of light levels in the picture from the glaring white of the snow on the pine tree through the black of the tree trunks - is much wider than the camera's image sensor can handle. If you expose for the snow, then you lose all of the shadow detail. Expose for the shadows, and all the snow gets blown out to featureless white. So, the camera has to pick a compromise exposure, which gets most of the levels right - but the brightest snow on the tree is all white and the shadows are inky black.
With film, that was all you could do. However, digital photography gives us another option - by shooting a number of pictures at a range of exposures, and then combining them in the processing software, you can get an image with a much larger dynamic range. The techy term for that is "HDR", for "High Dynamic Range".
This sort of image is perfect for that kind of manipulation. So, I tried taking five pictures at one f-stop intervals - two stops underexposed, one stop under, "normal" exposure, one stop overexposed and two stops over - and then used Photoshop's "Merge to HDR" function to merge them all into one HDR. There are lots of different adjustments and presets in the function - my favorites were the basic HDR, "Saturated", "Surrealistic Artistic" and "Monochrome".
This is the basic HDR image:
Saturated (emphasizes color):
Surrealistic Artistic (high contrast and exaggerated color):
Monochrome:
It's not something I'd do every day or to every image, but HDR can give you some interesting results.
