HDR Photography with Scott Dimond

HDR master Scott Dimond (Gemstone Images) spoke with the Calgary Photographic Society about incorporating HDR into our work.

For landscapes, the photographer is often forced to deal with a bright sky and a darker foreground that falls outside of the dynamic range of most DSLRs.  In cases where there is a clean linear division between the sky and foreground a graduated ND filter was/is the traditional solution.  GradND filters do not work, however, when you have more complex scenes with no clean horizon and that is one area where HDR shines.  In these instances you can shoot a series of photographs correctly exposed for each element in the photograph.  Using HDR software these images can be pulled together into a single image where the properly exposed sections of each image are used.

Scott's Shooting Workflow:

• Static subject.
• Camera on Tripod!
• Focus and then turn of AF
• Shoot in aperture priority or manual
• Dial back the exposure enough that you have a gap at the dark end of the histogram.  This means you are not clipping any detail in the shadows.
• Work your way up the bright end taking an exposure every couple stops
• Keep shooting until your histogram shows a gap on the bright end.  Once you reach this point you are no longer clipping highlight detail.
• The key is to take enough images that you are never clipping detail.

Post Workflow:

• Load images into Aperture/Lightroom and perform minimal correction (white balance)
• Apply any adjustments consistently to ALL images in the HDR set
• Export frames to TIFF files (make sure that EXIF information stays with image)
• Load those into Photomatix
• Use "Exposure Fusion" for natural looking HDR and "Tone Mapping" for something a bit more wild

Links:

• Photomatix is a very popular commercial HDR offering.
• Hydra is a commercial HDR offering with Lightroom, PS, and Aperture plugins.
• Enfuse is a free command-line tool for merging multiple exposures together.