Lou Oates -HDR High Dynamic Range Photography

High Dynamic Range (HDR) Photography
"Done properly HDR is much more than just a fad" -- Lou Oates Prices & Ordering
There's a lot of interest these days in HDR photography because of the powerful way it can change an image. It definitely has a "wow" value for those who are most interested in bright, vivid colors impossible to achieve with traditional digital image manipulation. I think that the value of HDR for me is in the ways it can dramatically widen the exposure range across an image in a manner that previously would have required extensive and expensive artificial lighting. This first traditional shot is the inside of Porter's, an Arizona bar and restaurant owned by a friend of mine. The bright sun outside and the sharp falloff of light from right to left obscures much detail and washes out much of the vibrant colors. Yet without additional lighting sources this would be about the best shot I could get from one exposure.

But by setting up my tripod and making eight exposures at one-stop intervals I was left with eight seperate photographs that I brought into Nic's HDR Efex Pro software(a Photoshop plugin) where it combined all those light values into one file. I was then able to modify the light captured and create the photograph below. Note how much of the shadow area now yields rich details and how the art on the walls are much more visible and interesting.


The next image is an antique barn reconstruction that I've photographed many times before. But I was always unhappy with the light fallout so I never made a print of it. When I returned to that barn recently I made seven exposures that yielded the vision I originally had for this place. After using HDR to capture all the highlight and shadow detail I converted it to black and white and added a sepia tone. Click on images to see larger.


This antique machinery was near the barn shown above. I envisioned this as a black and white image but I was unhappy with the normally shot single exposure shown in color below so I added another seven exposures and processed them in HDR before converting it to black and white shown on the right.


In these last shots you can see how the exposures are balanced between bright sun and shadows. Some show more experimenting than others as I ventured deeper into the HDR controls.






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