HDR Photography

When I write on this blog, the subject matter--more often than not--deals with religion, and rarely with politics. Once in a while, I come across something else that occupies my mind for a while and I think, "I ought to put that on my blog." This is one of those items.

Last winter, I came across a couple of pictures of the Salt Lake Temple--posted on a blog by a visitor to Salt Lake City. He referred to the pictures as "HDR" photographs--which I had never heard of.  I learned over a couple of weeks that this is a way to take pictures that more closely mimics the  human eyes' ability to perceive texture. Standard photography is limited when both bright and dark images are captured in the same frame. For example, when taking a picture from inside a room looking out the window, if the exposure is correct for inside the room, everything outside will be washed out. Conversely, if the exposure is appropriate for sunlight, everything inside the room will be too dark. HDR photography allows the photographer to use computer technology to take several photographs at different exposures and fuse them together later. This makes it possible to capture the image of a dark gray temple with a bright blue sky in the background where the colors and features appear as they would when seen by the human eye.

The more expensive camera you have, the easier it is to produce HDR images, and since I have a low-end Nikon, I've had to work a little harder than if I had a higher end camera. I'm still learning how to work around problems like movement of people or clouds between exposures, but the clarity of the photographs is so high that I'm very disappointed that I didn't know of this technique a year ago when I went to Israel and Jordan.

With an entry level Canon or Nikon camera and about $100 for software, anyone can produce remarkable images. With HDR, I've found a renewed interest in taking photographs.  Pictures have to be taken in "RAW" format--which I now do exclusively, and a great on-line tutorial is available to learn the basics. Even single exposure images have an added dimension of texture unavailable in standard JPG format. Here are a couple of the pictures I have taken since last February.