HDR Video - FACT or FICTION?

Right, I'm going to sneak this in before Neil takes away my posting rights... this one aimed at the videography wing of the club. Maybe some of you saw this when it rolled up on Slashdot a few months ago:



Now if you happened to have a pair of 5Ds and a beam splitter lying around the house I guess you could do this at home if you had enough patience. But I have to say that it does really look quite unreal. The clip of the man just looks like he's just lost a fight with a bag of icing sugar.

I think we've just trained to see pictures and film in a certain way and it will take some time to untrain our brains to accept HDR as soemthing which corresponds to our perception of the world.

HDRI Updates....

Remember in the past we have talked about High Dynamic Range Imaging, which had its origins in CGI Graphic artist industry and is now finding its way more and more into photography.?

I just discovered a new website "HDRI News" which is dedicated to the theme, and that also offers software, news, an online community and lots of inspirational images...


You might also want to take a look at "Digital Outback Photo" as well, which is pioneering new HDRI techniques using DSLRs with fast frame rates (> 5fps), thereby eliminating the need for a tripod and opening up the opportunity for using HDRI without limitations...

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..

HDR.... fad or the future...?

HDR or High Dynamic Range is method of merging images taken at different exposure settings, such that both the highlights and shadows are maintained.

How many times have you tried to take a picture from inside a room and try to get the view out the window as well..? What normally happens is that you can get the view out of the window correctly exposed, but then the room is dark, or the room properly exposed and the view completely blown out. Thats because the dynamic range of your film, transparencies or CCD is limited, so it can't record the whole range of light values present. So you have to choose whether you want detail in the shadows, or in the highlights because you can't have both... until now... 'you mean I can have it all !!!'... well sort of....

You can now take three or more exposures covering the mids, highlights and shadows, stuff these images into a piece of software like Photomatix which then combines the images, performs tone mapping and gives you back an image with everything..... Sounds good doesn't it... so where's the catch ?? Well.... all your images have to be the same, pixel for pixel, so you need a tripod, then you have to adjust your camera up and down at least 2 stops. You now have to process 3 files instead of one and well... the tone mapping can give you some pretty funky results, very artistic but not exactly true to life... (I imagine sometime in the future all this will be done in-camera in the blink of an eye, but until then...)

The web is awash with interesting examples, like here and here. If you want to read a good tutorial, try this one... and have a go.. its lots of fun.