I agree - it's excellent the way he's used the DoF and the lighting. Then I like the perfect exposure in the b&w picture - it looks very HDR-ish. I just can't make up my mind ........
I'm still none the wiser. I'm guessing it's something about the range of brightness, reflectivity, texture, exposure or contrast..... cos it aint about colour.... that much i do know
Its about exposure It uses 3 photos with different parts exposed correctly and then they are all joined together... by this I mean, the sky, the land and the sea all exposed correclty and then the three photos laid together for example.
Hang on, but doesn't that actually mean the dynamic range has actually been limited, or compressed? Each of the original photos would have had more/higher dynamic range that the result surely....
You could be right - I have confused myself now - GOOGLE time. Everytime I have done HDR thats the way that I have shot them and they come out how they should.
HDR sets exposures for different elements of the shot. If you expose for a perfect sky, you will lose detail in the darker area's and vice versa. So you are getting a broader dynamic range by using seperate exposures. Each shot is more limited I suppose, but together you get a broader range
Ah, so by getting all the elements of the photo at the right exposure (for good detail), the dynamic range of the exposure for the whole photo has been increased.
Yes - that about sums it up. (In good English! ) No camera equipment yet has reached the ability of the brain to translate what it sees. Even the best of the current lot of cameras don't have (and possibly never will) the ability to see full dynamic range - which means it can't see the full details at either extreme, so no details in bright white areas whihc get burned out, nor details in shadows/dark areas. So the camera/sensor makes the best attempt it can, but often exposes for the middle ground, or one extreme, so you'll get a good photo of a building/person but a burned out sky, or a good sky with a dark person in the foreground. With HDR, you take at least two and up to ten, pictures, exposing correctly for certain areas in each picture to give you the best possible detail. Then use an HDR program or Photoshop, to combine them to keep full range of details in all areas. You can cheat - take one mid-range exposure picture in RAW, then alter your RAW file to produce good exposures of different areas, then combine them all. The give-away, often, is having a good picture with a really dramatic sky, which is what the B&W picture reminded me of. Perhaps we can have a competition at some time, with HDR the subject, and everyone can have a go at it - you don't necessarily need a fancy camera or software (although it helps if you do!
So film has a higher dynamic range than digi, does that mean that it would have caught more detail in the contrasting areas?
your camera should have 'bracketing', where you can set the 'middle' exposure setting, and a factor +/- 0.5/1 etc and it will take three shots with three different exposures instantly!! its great. I dont really do HDR but I do sometimes blend two different raw's. Obviously you can change the exposures of the raw before you convert it like stella said but i like to have a couple of different shots as a starting point
Patience! Voting ends tonight, though I don't think there's much doubt over whose won. Depending on the choice of subject for the next competition by the winner of this one (whoever that is! ), I may decide to run one with Christmas/Winter as the subject. Let's see how it goes.