Everything’s about being HD these days, isn’t it? There’s High Definition TV. High Definition radio. Howard Dean. I’ve been reading up on a new photographic technique called High Dynamic Range Imaging, or HDR for short. HDR is essentially a tool for cheating – it allows you to show a much greater range of exposure in your photos than traditional cameras allow.

When you’re shooting a scene with a lot of lights and darks, you essentially have to force your camera into a decision that your eyes don’t have to make. With a camera, you have to choose to focus your exposure on the light or the shadows. If you expose your photo for the highlights, detail will be lost in the shadows. If you expose your photo for the shadows, then the detail there will be preserved but the highlights will be blown out.

The traditional photographic technology that is used to compensate for this problem (particularly in landscape photography) is a graduated filter. This filter is dark at the top and light at the bottom, which will typically help you compensate for the difference between the sky (light) and the landscape (dark) and get better exposures. But now, post-processing technology now allows you to combine a series of shots (called “bracketing“) to create a photograph that shows detail in both the highlights and the shadows.

I went out today and messed around with this technique a bit. These photos certainly aren’t anything fantastic, but they’re a good experimentation.

These first two photos are what two different exposures of the same shot would look like. The shot on the left is exposed for the shadows – you can see all the detail in the forest in the background – but the lighter sky and ice are blown out with a significant loss of detail. The shot on the right is exposed for the highlights (notice the nice blue sky and detail in the ice), but some detail in the shadows is lost.

I actually took 5 “bracketed” shots here and combined them into this one photo using HDR.There’s a bit of a surreal effect (which is not something I typically desire, but I’ve done it on purpose here) – but you get the idea. You get to preserve the detail both in the shadows and in the highlights. Pretty cool.

And here’s one more shot produced by HDR. Again, nothing amazing, but it’s a good experiment.

So this is a good start into delving into HD photography. This wasn’t the ideal setting or lighting for producing the kind of HDR shots I’d like to eventually, but I just wanted to get out and mess around a bit. Ideally, I’ll try using this in some landscape photography on a day that is light but cloudy – hopefully I can get some shots that preserve the landscape detail and the detail of the clouds.