Weighing in on HDR

Aurorus Reflectus Colosseo, originally uploaded by Stuck in Customs.

This is the first HDR image I ever saw, and I was blown away by it. I sat staring at my computer screen and thought “Wow. How did they even do that?”

Then, I saw the flickr tag [HDR] attached to the image, clicked it, and the door to a whole new world of image possibilities was opened. I’ve tried a few of my own HDR images, which don’t compare to the masters of the art but which are fun to shoot and intriguing to play with. The problem is, ever since I’ve started seeing these images, I’ve seen comments underneath them which decry them as being fake, or not really photographs. This is a position that I don’t accept at all, and I always feel that people have a weird, narrow and close-minded idea of what a photograph is.

Photography is an Art, not a Competitive Sport.

Sport needs rules. FIFA, IOC, NBA, ICC and a whole host of international and local acronyms exist to evaluate performances, equipment and rules of every game invented, to make sure that what happens on the pitch, court or field is cricket, football, golf or basketball or whatever, and that each event is fair and the playing fields are level. Photography is not like this. There is no International Photographic Committee, which regulates which cameras, lenses and tripods are acceptable, and which technique is allowed to you on game day. There are no performance-enhancing techniques that are banned, and there is no way of making an image that is outlawed due to an unfair advantage.

Photography is a communicative art form, and that means that anything goes when it comes to making an image: if you can communicate the picture of the world that you had in your imagination to someone else through an image, you’ve succeeded. End of story.

All media are less than perfect at representing the world due to technical limitations which arise from the physical characteristics of that media, and it would be a dumb to try and limit development of a medium because it will be better than it was before. The essence of development is extension and improvement, and this has been happening to photographic media ever since the first silver nitrate image was made. HDR techniques are the latest imaging trend in a long line of developments which can be traced back to at least 1280 AD, and the development of silver nitrate by Abertus Magnus. Yes, people. 1280 AD.

It always gets me when people say “Nice work, but it’s not really photography – more like cheating” when talking about an imaging technique. I guess Man Ray may have had some of these comments while showing his solarized images – but it seems that in the digital imaging age, more techniques are being developed, and more people are taking photography seriously. Many of these people seem to have forgotten that “image” and “imagine” come from the same root, and that Latin root “imago” refers to “an idealized mental image” of another person or of the self.

It’s that definition of image that we should remember with photography. There really is no such thing as photographic realism – even for journalism. In the old days of “pure” analogue photography the photographer could select image elements and manipulate them with camera settings and darkroom techniques. Photography could only approximate reality, but never truly represent it. A photographer should realize that their craft occupies a nexus between their experiential world and their inner world, and that any method of realizing either of these worlds in a two-dimensional format is fair game.

Hello HDR

Enter the High Dynamic Range image. And it’s kind of disappointing to see that even in this small and contested niche of imaging, there are 2 separate debates as to HDR’s authenticity as an imaging method. The first is whether HDRs are photographs, and the second is which method of creating an HDR is the “true” method. So I’m going to talk first about what an HDR image is, and then we’ll see that there really is no such thing as a “true” or a “false” HDR image.

An HDR image is a single image which has used more than one exposure value to create a dynamic range which extends beyond what is possible to capture with a single exposure. There is more detail, from shadows to highlights, than would be possible in an image using other techniques.

To create an HDR image, you generally need a digital camera that shoots at above 8-bit resolution and software that can overlay your images to create that heightened dynamic range in a single image. Of course you can use a scanner to scan your negs or prints, and people have developed techniques for brute-forcing JPEGs into HDRs, but to keep it simple I’ll just describe the RAW version.Photomatix is both easy and free to use, but leaves a light watermark until you pay for it.

"Pure" HDR images:

The easiest way to create your HDR is to find a non-moving scene with a lot of contrast from dark to light, and set up your camera on a tripod. First, set your light balance to manual, and adjust it according to your scene. Then, find the master exposure by shooting the scene at your camera’s recommended exposure. From this, you will adjust your shutter speed to shoot 3 images at lower exposure levels (by stopping down in 3 successive steps) and then you’ll return to the master exposure level and then shoot three images at higher exposure levels by stopping up in 3 successive steps).

You do this so that the camera has captured a range of images which will show detail from the vary dark areas of your scene into the very light areas.

Then, when you get home, open each image in camera raw, make sure that they are all the same white balance, and open them in your HDR generating software. The software will overlay the images, and then you will begin to have creative control over what the final scene will look like – from realistic but detailed to very saturated and akin to an oil painting done by an old master or renaissance era painting.

The other kind of HDR

That's great, if you can find a scene that doesn't move. But what happens when you have things in the frame that won't godammed settle down. Trees blowing in the wind. People. Animals. Cars. Even clouds or waves, if you are using longer exposures. Well, then you use your single raw file, adjust the exposure level using camera raw in the manner described above (Master, 3 incremenal stops down and 3 incremental stops up) and save the files as copies. Then, open in your HDR software, blend, rinse and repeat.

Making it look right (or wrong, depending on what you're trying to do)

I can’t do better than this blog at describing what that creative control of an HDR image entails, so I’ll send you on over for further reading. It's a great read, and it's got some stunning HDR images to keep you turning the digital pages, so have a look - it didn't start a wave of interest that redefined blog reader statistics for nothing!

So, there we have it. HDR. Hardly a tool of the devil, now is it? Certainly not going to bring civilization as we know it to its knees. Just a very nice tool for you to render your mental image of a scene in a two-dimensional way. And if you want to see why you may want to do this, have a look at these phenomenal HDR images, and keep going back to the HDR group on flickr.

Cloud Gate, originally uploaded by iceman9294.

A perfect example of a little HDR processing going a long way. The photo doesn't look blown out into the realm of painting, but there is a range of detail across the light spectrum which adds to the "interestingness" of the image.

One Night in Bangkok, originally uploaded by Stuck in Customs.

I love this one, not just because of the techinical skill (although Stuck in Customs does have a lot, and many other photos display it to greater advantage) but because I used to live justg behind this temple in Bangkok, and I would see it every day on my morning and evening ferry trips to work.

Sun and Signs, originally uploaded by .: sandman.

Another great photorealistic HDR, although the shooter argues that at the time he took this photo the sky didn't look anything like it does in the picture. This image is a poster child for HDR processing: I've tried very similar shots to this one at a turnoff to Nieu Bethesda in South Africa, and been very disappointed with the results: traditional camera techniques are inadequate for this kind of image. You could never get detail in the sign and have the sun behind it.

A great shot, and deceptively simple.

The Chesil Beach at Portland - Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site, originally uploaded by petervanallen.

Here again we have that warm, rich "HDRness". And again, this image looks very much like a traditional photo. The crisp colours, and details in all of the shadows (even those pebbles have full shadow depth) is incredible. Again, this photo is shot into a setting sun, but we have colour, texture and perspective. Traditional methods would yield a silhouette.

Re-enter the Dragon- in a boat.

It’s that time of year again for anyone who lives in a Chinese community: Dragon Boat Festival is again upon us. You have to love the fact that we’re getting a free holiday on Monday ‘cos the festival is on Sunday, but you have to love even more the opportunities for photos that go with the boat races.

Last year in Hong Kong was exceptionally hot, and very bright and sunny, on boat racing day. This led to a few problems for me shooting the event, and although I got some nice shots, they’re not perfect. The difference between the highlights and shadows was huge, because I only really got into my stride after 10:30 (and they only started racing the big boats around then, too) and this meant that there was a lot of really strong light being reflected off the water, the boats and the oars. The shadows were pretty heavy, too, and while I was pulling the details of the shadows out in photoshop I ended up with slightly overexposed shots.

Here are a few which should show you what I mean. The photos are best viewed large, of course, click through (by clicking the image itself)to my Flickr page and check them out there:



This vies for my best shot of the day, and even with the exposure issues, was picked up for the website of the Peninsula Hotel, where it will be published soon. But I still want to get a better shot of the races this year.



This shot is one of my personal favourites. It's quite dynamic, and gets the frenetic pace and mood of the day. With flash from my side of the photo, hopefully this shot will work better.



Here's one of the tighter close-ups that I discuss a little further down on this blogpost, but it really shows the exposure flaws, and I hope that I'll be able to balance exposure here with grad filters and flash this year.



The real problem is in the venue itself: I live in Tuen Mun, in Hong Kong, and I prefer to be a part of the community here than to trek all the way out to Hong Kong Island, where I don’t really feel a part of anything. The boat races in Tuen Mun happen as the mouth of the river, which empties out into the sea at a typhoon shelter. The bank of the river where the races are held faces directly east, and in the early morning shots from that river bank will silhouette, leaving no colour detail. Fine for artistic shots (with a heap of luck) but after a while it gets tedious. Later on, the sunlight becomes very contrasty, and causes major exposure headaches: I was metering an 8-stop difference at 10:30.

I was using my Nikon D50 with a set of 17- 80 and 70-300 zooms, but no flash as I didn’t have a fast and powerful unit back then. I also didn’t use any filters, which would have helped me out a lot: balancing that harsh, light-grey sky and making it a little more interesting to look at. This year, I’m hoping to get on top of these aspects: I’ve got a set of 2-stop Cokin Grads for this, and I’m going to take my Cokin warming filter, to deal with the colouring of the midday sun, and give the pictures a warmer tone. I’ve also got a speedlite which should allow me to fill in some of the closer boats, and balance for the strong back sunlight which was a problem during the earlier part of the day. I’ve also got a polarizer, which should help later in the day only- you need to be 90 degrees to the angle of the sunlight for it to have an effect, and we face east for the shooting, so the sun will have to be quite high up for the filter to work.

I learned a lot from my composition from last year: try to leave as much of the sky out as possible. But I maintain that photography has much more to do with exposure than composition. You can crop and so on to improve composition, but a badly exposed shot will never really be satisfying.

I’ve also learned form last year that the best races to shoot are the heats rather than the finals. Maybe I was more committed than other shooters last year (but I think more because I had no idea what the line-up of the day was like, not being able to read Chinese) ‘cos I was down at the riverside at 07:00 am. Most shooters got there around 11:00 am. Which meant that I had a lot of space to run round in, and could choose my spot easily. The light was also closer to balanced, and I got more useable frames at this time than any other.

The events to go for are the big boat races- and the speed at which they shot past me was incredible. I tended to get a lot of motion blur, which worked really well in some shots, and not at all well in others. I’m going to the blur shots again this year, blut I’m also going to try and hit freeze-frame as well. What I noticed last year was that the freeze-frames needed to be quite tight close ups, which worked much better on the boat’s drummer than on the paddlers, and that these tight shots were much easier to get when I was at quite an angle to the boats, which meant they needed to be far away. Bigger lenses aren’t going be good, I doubt, because you’ll have trouble tracking the boats, and the shots will be too focused on one or two people in the boats. This is definitively a team sport, and shots of the whole team are better than shots of the individual most of the time.

When they got 90 degrees to me, I was able to get much better motion blur, as the speed was much more noticeable. But these shots needed to have a whole boat in them at least to be interesting, and the best ones comprised one boat that was in sharp focus in the foreground, and the others blurry in the background. It looked much better when that foreground boat was winning, too, which isn’t something that you can organize.

The last bit of experience that I got from last year was that the finish line is NOT the thing to shoot. Stay close to it, but shoot the boats coming toward you, otherwise you lose the excitement of the race. Faces and Eyes are important, even for these shots of people. The celebrations are good, though, if the winning boat is close to you.

But hey, it’s a sport, and sports shooting is often the most challenging because you can’t plan for it. It’s also some of the most fun, because of this.

Some other information about Hong Kong Dragon Boats:

• Biggest event: Stanley
• This year, there is a competition for photos which are shot in the Aberdeen area of Hong Kong, because this area was the first place to start Dragon Boat racing in Hong Kong.

World Press Photo Award interviews

It's the time of the year when World Press Photo features the interviews of the behind-the-scenes activity around some of the press photos of the year and the year before in the archive. Have a look around the site, there are over 40 interviews with some of the best photographers working today, and some really phenomenal images under discussion.

The link is here.