Here’s a tutorial on how to do non-automated HDR for real estate photography using Photoshop CS5. The first thing you’ll need is a sturdy tripod with a level. The closer you are to a leveled image, the less correction you’ll have to do later.
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The Washington Post raised some eyebrows last Friday after running an uber-saturated front page photo with the caption stating that it was “a composite created by taking several photos and combining them with computer software to transcend the visual limitations of standard photography.” After emailing the photo editor, Poynter learned that the image was simply an HDR photograph. While it’s a pretty common technique these days, some believe that it has no place in photojournalism,
Sean Elliot, president of the National Press Photographers Association, said, “HDR is not appropriate for documentary photojournalism.” The organization’s code of ethics say photographers should respect the integrity of the digital moment, “and in that light an HDR photo is no different from any other digital manipulation.”
“By using HDR,” he told me by email, “The Washington Post has combined different moments, and thereby created an image that does not exist. The aircraft visible in the final product was not there for all the other moments combined into the final, and that alone simply raises too many questions about the factual validity of the actual published image.” [#]
What complicates matters is that many new cameras (e.g. Nikon D4, Apple iPhone 4S) offer HDR features that create single images from multiple exposures in the camera. The Washington Post published a response to the controversy yesterday. Do you think HDR is an appropriate technique for photojournalists to use?
(via The Washington Post via Poynter)
Image credits: Screenshot from The Washington Post, and photograph by Bill O’Leary
Here’s an educational time-lapse tutorial by Los Angeles-based architectural photographer Mike Kelley in which he walks through how he goes about photographing buildings. His technique might be described “manual HDR” — after shooting the building over a longish period of time to capture different lightings, he then enters the scene and lights different areas of the building using two Canon 430EX Speedlites. Afterward, he loads the stills into Photoshop and selects different portions of the scene from different photos depending on the lighting he wants. The finished composite photo ends up looking as if it were lit by a large number of Speedlites.
Late last year we showed you an interesting demonstration of HDR video filmed using two Canon 5D Mark IIs. The cameras captured the exact same scene at different exposure values using a beam-splitter. Now, a new camera called AMP has been developed that captures real-time HDR video using a single lens. The trick is that there are two beam-splitters in the camera that take the light and direct it onto three different sensors, giving the system a dynamic range of 17 stops. Check out some sample clips in the video above — they might be pretty ugly, but the technology here is pretty interesting.
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Here’s a good example of when HDR photography is useful: NASA created this image of the Space Shuttle Endeavour lifting off for the final time by combining six separate photographs.
Each image was taken at a different exposure setting, then composited to balance the brightness of the rocket engine output with the regular daylight levels at which the orbiter can be seen. The processing software digitally removes pure black or pure white pixels from one image and replaces them with the most detailed pixel option from the five other images. This technique can help visualize debris falling during a launch or support research involving intense light sources like rocket engines, plasma experiments and hypersonic vehicle engines. [#]
In mid-2010, Time Magazine showed off a demonstration of a slick tablet app they were making in collaboration with The Wonderfactory. As it became widely shared across the web, HDR photographer Trey Ratcliff of Stuck in Customs started receiving messages from fans who spotted his work in the video demo. Problem was, he had never given the magazine or the agency permission to use his work.
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Here’s a beautiful tone mapped HDR time-lapse video of Las Vegas shot by Philip Bloom using a few Canon DSLRs and a Panasonic GH2. He spent 5 days shooting, and many more processing the bracketed photographs using Photomatix Pro. It’s pretty amazing seeing Las Vegas go from day to night and then back again — all in HDR. To find out how Bloom did this, check out the behind-the-scenes writeup and video over on his blog.
Flickr user Paul Little creates surreal images he calls “HDR Mixes” by combining different photographs with the help of HDR software. While you’re normally supposed to feed the program multiple versions of the same photo (which are bracketed), with HDR Mixes you use two photos of the same scene and a third that’s completely unrelated.
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Here’s a cool and creative video that will only take 6 seconds of your time. Photographs from 3 different locations were taken every day over the course of six months, converted to HDR imagery, and combined into this short time-lapse video that shows the changing of a face and of seasons.
The changing of seasons in HDR is an interesting concept that we hope to see more of in the future!
Thanks for the link, IA!
Patryk Kizny created this short HDR time-lapse film titled “The Chapel” that explores the inside of a Protestant chapel located in Zeliszów, Poland built in 1797. The HDR imagery gives the video a eerily beautiful surreal look that makes the video look like it came from a video game.
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