HDR Images

I first heard of HDR photography when reading an interview with an amateur photographer in a photography magazine. After reading the magazine I did some further research and stumbled across many photographers on Flickr that employ the technique. It interested me immediately because of the hyper real effect it has on the images. I read an article and tutorial online at http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/high-dynamic-range.htm which was very helpful in understand what HDR is and how it works.

As you can see from the originals above I tried to create this HDR image using only two photographs, one with the exposure correct for the sky and one with the exposure correct for the foreground. The images are of a sunset of the coast of Cornwall. Unfortunately without realising I must have moved the tripod slightly when taking the two images and as you can see from the resulting image I was unable to create a working HDR image from the two photographs. This really demonstrates how precise one has to be when trying to create a HDR image; slight movement can result in the failure of the image.

I thought this would be a good location to try and create another HDR image, the window frame in the foreground needing a different exposure to the setting sun skyline. Using the camera setting designed for HDR images, I took 3 photographs each with different exposures – one under-exposed, one mid-exposed and one over-exposed. I followed a tutorial from a magazine (below) in order to try and create the image, however, I found this very challenging and I am not happy with the final image. The tutorial states that it is often best to try and capture 3 elements in the photograph, as this one only has two I feel this may be one of the reasons the photograph is not very successful.
I ran out of time within this project to try and master HDR photography, but it continues to interest me greatly and I hope to be able to look at it again in further work.


I found this magazine and others that I looked at extremely helpful when thinking of ideas and with technical help.


These are a few of the very impressive HDR images I have found on Flickr.