HDR Photography, Tutorials, and Travel Photo Blog
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This is one of those shots that I really didn’t have high hopes for. I just snapped off a few exposures casually as I walked by. I didn’t recognize this photo’s true potential until I started post processing in photoshop. Once I added back the saturation, contrast, and texture, it suddenly took form and came alive. If you compare the before and after, you can see how extreme the difference is.
Golden Hour in Venice is quite a sight. With the right weather conditions, everything seems to sing. No matter what direction you look, there are stunning golden highlights and long dramatic shadows. It’s truly a wonderful time to be walking the streets.
If you view the before and after comparison you will notice that the neutral exposure has a blown out sky. Since the sun is so low in the sky, the overall brightness increases by quite a bit. Even though there are beautiful clouds and atmospheric details, you lose them in a single exposure. That alone makes this shot a perfect candidate for HDR Processing.
If your camera has Auto Exposure Bracketing (AEB), enable it and set it to capture -2, 0, +2. That’s 2 stops (of light) darker and 2 stops lighter than the neutral (0) exposure. Like this photo, those 3 exposures, some Tone Mapping in Photomatix & a bit of Photoshop magic should give you some nice results.
I’ve been getting a lot of questions & comments about the beauty of Venice lately so today I thought I’d post something a little less, well… Beautiful.
It’s still Venice and yes, it’s also an HDR Photograph. It was a weird angle so I sort of had to crawl underneath my tripod to set up the shot. It was an awkward task for 3am, even by my standards.
If you compare the before and after images you can see the dramatic difference between a single exposure and the processed HDR result. Check it out and answer a question for me.
Is this side of Venice still beautiful?
I used this photo as part of a discussion about Vertical vs Horizontal Compositions. In that post, I talked a bit about why we (may or may not) favor one format to the other. Take a look if you want to see the alternate (vertical) version of this shot.
This was the view from a random dead end street where we sat down for lunch. It was a nice location to have a quiet (isolated + people free) meal. We only had to share the space with an occasional rat or two as they scurried by. I offered them a bit of wine but they weren’t interested. Apparently, these Venice rats only drink red.
This HDR Photo was taken at the same time as Vertigo-go using 5 handheld exposure brackets from (-2 to +2). The challenging bit was taking the shots without a ton of people moving into (and around) the frame.
Piazza San Marco is (arguably) the tourist capital of Venice and is always buzzing with activity. This time, I thought my timing was perfect and that everyone had moved out of frame. I was wrong. If you take a look at the before picture, you can see a guy casually standing behind the right pillar, hiding from me. Oops. Thank goodness for the Photoshop Clone Stamp. 
The texture here was also (dramatically) enhanced, giving the photo a very rough and contrasty feel. The couple sitting down on the right help add to the scale of the structure. If they didn’t, I would have ninja’d them out too.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could clone other things out in life…;)
This is one of those shots where I literally gave my Nikon 14-24 Lens a little kiss. In fact, It’s such a profoundly awesome hunk of glass that if it had lips, I’m confident that I’d be divorced by now…
Most of my shots (I would say at least 85% of them) are shot using the 14-24. I really get a kick out of how much I can fit in frame from such a short distance away. With superior optical quality, It’s a fantastic lens for HDR Photography and well worth the $$ price tag.
HDR Photography opens up a lot of doors when It comes to texture. When you stack up all the Exposure Brackets (AEB), it fills in the highlight and shadow regions of the image with more color and luminance information. With a single exposure alone, these regions would otherwise be void of detail, either washed out or just black. With neutral or mid tones, stacking exposures enhances what’s already there and increases detail and texture overall.
If you combine wide angle lenses and HDR Processing together, you can yield some truly interesting results. It takes a bit of experimentation and a lot of trial and error (mostly error), but hey, isn’t that part of the fun?
