Thursday 1 February 2007

HDR and things that move...

After reading some comments made by Mauro to the previous post I thought it might be useful to mention that if you like this HDR thing, but were put off by the fact that you have to use a tripod and obviously things in the image can't move between frames, this somewhat restricting you subject matter.... There is actually a way of making HDR images with just one frame.

For example, look at the fella above, who I found when we were on holiday in Andalucia (didn't know Chameleons where indigenous to the south of Spain !), although not known for his blistering speed, he wasn't going to hang around while I set up the tripod etc, etc... and anyway, what his body lacked in velocity, his eye more than made up the difference.... So one frame was all I got...

Well then, if your camera can shoot in Raw and you use this mode of operation you can create 3 images using the raw converter that you need to handle these sort of images. Basically, you bias the exposure -2 stops from the original, save the image, same again for + 2 stops... and there you have it 3 images to plug into you HDR software... and thanks to the latitude of the raw image you can get away with it (most of the time). Obviously, it depends on the exposure of your original image (i.e don't completely blow the highlights because you can never recover them) and it doesn't quite produce the same level of subtlety as 3 separate images... but hey you getting 3 for the price of one..

2 comments:

Caminante said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Caminante said...

Understood. One more reason to use raw format. This advice would have come in handy a year ago. My wife was touching a deer. She was under midday light and the deer under a strong shadow. As you can imagine that photo will never be printed :(

P.S: Opps, it seems editing is not possible. I was trying to change a misspelled word but I had to remove the full message in order to do that.