Godbeams and Shadow Details

OK, most of the population doesn't even give a rip about HDR, or for that matter, have the slightest idea what it means even after you tell them it means High Dyanamic Range. But you're not most of the population. You scour the internet to read photo blogs, you get emails from DigitalPhotographySchool.com every morning and don't consider them spam, and you time your vacation request so you can shoot the full moon rising over Half Dome just like Ansel. But you still don't try HDR? Why? Reason #1, you've got to use a tripod. Reason #2 it's too complicated. Reason #3, you've got to buy special software. Well, here's an end around all three excuses. Number one, using the tripod. In order for HDR to work, you need to take multiple exposures of the (almost) exact same scene. With a still life, this is easy. With people, it's not. The shot you see here was shot handheld, but I used auto bracketing to take three separate exposures at +1.0/0/-1.0 exposure compensation in less than 1 second. Auto bracketing gets you around the tripod issue as long as you hold the camera steady for the whole tic-a-tic sequence. Number two, it's too complicated. No, not if you get the auto bracketing thing down and find a subject that doesn't have a lot of things that move in it. You need at least a three shot sequence, and you need to download a program called Photomatix from the web, pick out the three shot sequence, and drop the three images into Photomatix and follow the menu. Number three, it's too expensive. No, Photomatix lets you download their program for a long time for free. Eventually, it starts to put a watermark on your images to coerce you to buy the key, but by that time, you'll have made up your mind and you'll probably either love or hate HDR photos. Personally, I'm somewhere in the middle. I like the airbrushed look that HDR can produce, but I'm also kind of a purist who wants a shot to work right through the lens with no image manipulation. I do like HDR, and I use it when I've got extremely high contrast scenes to deal with that I know my chip won't be able to handle any other way. I go into this knowing ahead of time there's a risk my shot's going to look like the latest World of Warcraft ad graphic. The godbeams, and the details inside the car would never have shown up in a single exposure of this scene, but with the computer picking out the best of each of the three images, it's a winner. That is, unless you're one of those people who hates HDR, and most of the people who fall into that category are jealous photographers who've either never tried it or tried it but quit.

The Exposure Trick That (Almost) Never Fails!

The three shots above definitely have one thing in common. They're all difficult to meter. At Yellowstone National Park, all the pictures from the "front side" of the geyser were way too cliche. Getting away from the masses, I found this couple sitting on a trailside. The backlighting of the water was glorious, and there were dark shadows in the foreground. With the limited dynamic range of today's digital cameras, getting the right exposure becomes absolutely critical. The Griffith Observatory in the hills over downtown LA presented a similar challenge, though this time the only backlighting was a faint glow in the blackening evening sky. The windows with their incandescent glows cast a bold, almost candlelight orange hue to complete the scene. The church with a diffraction fringe around the top of the steeple completes the set of three problem lighting conditions. Though there are a lot of tricks of the trade that can be employed to bring out all of these shots, but it's not about post processing using photoshop layers, shooting in .raw and tweaking the levels, or using auto bracketing. Whenever you're faced with a difficult contrasty landscape scene like these there's amazingly simple cure to help nail critical exposure. Meter the sky.

The Five Second Rule

Ok, us guys have all heard of the five second rule. If something good to eat falls on the ground, it's fair game to grab it up and put it in your mouth as long as you get it in five seconds. But the other week I was reading a photography magazine article saying something about five seconds being the right exposure time for a lot of motion blur shots. And you know what, amazingly enough, it seems to work. Of course, any artsie stuff like this needs to come with a caveat. You need to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince using any creative photography technique.