Shooting HDR

HDR

I shot it in HDR (High Dynamic Range), which means it was originally three separate images. Maybe you've heard already of HDR, it is a technique which allows you to squeeze every little detail out of your scenery by merging different photos of the exact same frame with different exposures. Usually, you take one photo with correct exposure, one under- and one overexposed.

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This is the beautiful little church of Glurns, a little yet famous village in Val Venosta.

Shoot at a constant aperture

The Exif-data for this image were an aperture of f.5 with a focal length of 18mm. I would have liked to even go up to f.11 to get more natural depth of field, but since I had no tripod with me, the lighting conditions forced me to go down. Now, the very important part is to shoot each of the three images with a constant aperture. Otherwise your images will have a different depth of field, which means you cannot merge them together accurately. This also implies that for HDR you cannot use the automatic mode or the "P"-mode on your camera, because the camera would of course decide to change the aperture in order to avoid very low shutterspeeds.

Which camera mode?

You can do it in manual mode ("M"), but i prefer to shoot in aperture priority mode ("Av" for Canon, "A" for Nikon) because it is less work. In aperture priority mode you only tell the camera to shoot at a certain aperture and let it balance itself the rest of the settings for a correct exposure. Furthermore, you can rely on your camera to adapt also the ISO (when set to auto) and save you some shutter-time.

How?

Most modern DSRL-cameras have a so called "auto-bracketing"-mode which alters the shutterspeed settings automatically for you (once you've definded them in the program), if you just press the shutterbutton long enough. The camera then takes 3 to 5 images directly after one another, so that these kind of shots can also be done hand hold if the lighting conditions are somewhat fair.

So for this image, the shutterspeed of course varied in all three pictures, so that I could shoot one image with correct exposure, one underexposed with -2 and one overexposed with +2.

Reveal details

The underexposed picture reveals all the details in the highlights that otherwise would be blown out at a normal exposure (which didn't exist in this case, because it was quite dark). The overexposed picture does exactly the opposite and reveals structure in the shadows.

Software

The three pictures were processed in Google's HDR Efex Pro (former Nik Software) which is a Photoshop plugin, but there are many more programs (also standalone) that can do this. I think the softwares which are used the most are Photomatix and HDR Efex Pro. For this final look, I reduced the noise and pumped up colors and contrast in Photoshop - and Voilà!

When to shoot HDR?

Predestined HDR-Situations are relatively easy to define. It's exactly those situations in which you normally wouldn't shoot, because the light is too dark, too bright, too sunny, too contrasty - so every situation in which you know your camera reaches its limits. In those cases you can always "cheat" by shooting 3 instead of 1 image!

HDR-Look

This is always a hot discussed topic, but i personally think that HDR is a great technique to get even more control over the look of your pictures. Sure, in the web there are also a lot of overdone examples, just google "hdr" ;), but I personally think that it can get you a great look, if you know how to balance it!

We all get a little crazy at first, don't we? ;)

You Want Sunrays? You Get Sunrays!

Do you sometimes see pictures in which the sun has these nice rays and they're exactly looking like we drew them in kindergarden?

Yes, me too, and i always think "it really makes a good photo look great". The sunrays, together with the lensflares, give your image instantly that kind of warmth and coziness - even if it's a winter wonderland like this.

So, how can you do it yourself?

First of all, anybody who has a camera with a manual mode can do it! The only three things you need is control over shutterspeed, aperture and ISO.

Small aperture

The key setting here, is to set a small aperture (big f-stop number) like f/11 or higher. Maybe you've already noticed yourself, if you take a picture with the sun at a large aperture like f/2.8 for instance, your sun is looking like a diffuse white area and the lensflares are undefined and superbig. 

But if you instead set your aperture to a value of 8+, your sun takes shape. Notice that the smaller your aperture, the finer and longer will your sunrays get and the more angled your lensflares will become. The effect will vary depending on the lens you use, but try around between f/11 and f/22 and you should get great results.

And there's another thing to take care of...

Mind your exposure

A common piece of photographer's wisdom is "don't shoot into the sun". In my opinion, this is only true for people who photograph in Auto-mode. Yes, if you're shooting directly into the sun, your camera is literally overwhelmed by all the light and is likely to underexpose your photo because it tries to compensate. 

But there are several ways out of this issue:

1) Use your camera exposure-correction

You can manually set the exposure settings, so that your camera overexposes in regard to its normal settings, which in turn balances the underexposure.

2) Use flash

If you're shooting a model or an object reasonable close to the lens, you can always use your flash to adjust the lighting conditions. If your focus is set properly, your camera will automatically adapt.

3) Shoot in HDR

This is what I did in this image. To get instructions on how to shoot HDR, have a look at this post. You basically shoot 3 or more photos of the same frame with different exposures, so that your computer can later compose the three exposures and pick the best parts of each shot.

And here are the Exif-data:

ISO 100, f/11 at three different shutterspeeds. Here are the three original pictures:

Now have fun shooting sunny pictures ;)