Access Digital Photography

I won’t say that this is THE workflow for getting the maximum HDR effect, but it’s certainly an effective one. It’s great for shooting and processing scenics, still-lifes, product photos and anything else that doesn’t move. It gives you complete control over the contrast and detail that can be seen in all areas of the image and the freedom to choose any of several methods for doing so. One end result is shown below:

Your chances of getting perfect exposure and tonal values are pretty close to 100%.  I’m considering “scenics” to be anything from nature to street scenes to long shots that are taken as orientation for an event or story shoot…including night shots. Here’s the step-by-step routine:

1.    Use at least a 4GB, better 8GB, memory card so you’ll have room for all the sequence shots you might want to shoot. Remember, you may be shooting 4-7 RAW files at a time.

2.    Set your camera to shoot RAW.

3.    Set your camera to shoot in Aperture Priority mode. You DO NOT want the camera to change aperture while you’re doing the sequence shots because the same objects in difference shots could have blurred details that wouldn’t register when the HDR is merged.

4.    Set the aperture at f/11, but change it to F/16 if you shoot from a tripod or your basic exposure reading is for a shutter speed of at least 1/50th second when shooting hand-held (1/20th second if you have good image stabilization). If you do shoot hand-held be very careful not to move the camera. Photoshop and most other HDR programs are very good at registering images in a stack, but don’t take any unecessary changes.

5.    Put your camera in rapid sequence bracket mode, with a difference between shots of as much as your camera allows. If that happens to be 2-f/stops, cut that back to 1.5 f/stops. If youíre given a choice of more or less shots in the sequence, take at least 5 unless youíre really cramped for memory. One of my favorite cameras only allows for .7 of a stop difference between exposures, so I have to shoot 5 shots to get the (close to) 1.5 stop difference I want between the first, third, and last shot. Hereís a Lightroom “contact sheet” screen shot of the series that was taken to create the finished image you see at the beginning of this blog.

6.    Set your camera for matrix metering.

7.    Use a tripod whenever possible, which means you should be sure to carry it with you. You’ll always take more time to study the scene and will compose more carefully. That is extremely important in the success of a scenic. You’ll also become independent of shutter speed and IS (Image Stabilization) for keeping your shot steady.

I always process my photos in Lightroom 2.4, so I have the choice of making an HDR image by selecting two or three of the shots (depending on the overall tonal range of the sequence), editing multiple shots as layers in Photoshop (easy way to bring in a sky and a foreground), or simply using the Recover, Fill Light, Adjustment Brush, Graduated Fill, Tone Curve and HSL panels. You’re not restricted to Lightroom, though. As long as you’ve got the detail exposed properly for all areas of the picture and haven’t lost a lot of extra time in the process, you can do much more in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements to fine tune the final result. I find the Exposure dialog in Photoshop especially useful for the final tweaking of the HDR.

Hurricane Ike sapped most of the moisture out of Florida. In spite of that, there were still enough clouds for a colorful sunset. In Lightroom, I used the Graduated Filter tool to decrease the exposure of the sky by about 1 stop, and pump up the blue color. My grandfather used to call a sunset like this, Sky Blue Pink.