Saturday 9 January 2016

HDR Photography #1

Since discovering the work of ‘Trey Ratcliff’, I have been enamoured with the idea of having an attempt at HDR photography. In the past, it had been a style of photography that had often repelled me as I found it to be garish and unrealistic. It looked far too processed and an unrealistic representation of the world. In hindsight, this was a close minded view on the topic that was spurred on by poor research. I had, and still do to an extent, have the mentality that everything must be achieved in camera with minimal post processing. A photograph can be 90% there, but it needs some tweaking in post production to make it great. If a photograph is terrible, there is little that can be done to save it. Adobe Photoshop is a fantastic program, but I don’t think there is a tool present to polish a piece of shit.

However, upon finding Trey’s work, I came to appreciate HDR in a new way. I loved the vibrancy of the colours and the range of visible detail that was present. Most importantly, I found Trey to be tasteful in his edits. Although his work had a dreamlike and surrealist quality to it, it wasn’t pushed to a garish extreme. I continued my research and I came upon two videos on Youtube by ‘B&H’ called ‘An Introduction to HDR’ and ‘Creating the Realistic HDR Image’ which presented me with a clear vision of what I wanted to achieve. I want to create high quality photography that accurately documents the world that I see before me. By utilising HDR, I feel that I can further myself as a photographer and assist me in producing the work that I envision.

I recently took a walk to the shop and decided to take my camera along, just encase the opportunity for some photography presented itself. I took a few photographs and I realised that the exposure in the image was not too my liking. Even though I did not have a tripod with me, I decided to attempt some HDR. In hindsight, I wish that I had brought my tripod, as it would have reduced movement when taking the exposures. I could have increased the ISO and Shutter Speed to compensate for this, but I felt that the final photograph would have too much noise to work with. For each photograph, I held the camera close to me, took a deep breath, took the photographs and exhaled. As I mentioned previously, I had no tripod with me so I had to adapt. I used bracketed exposure which was set accordingly, depending on the light that was present in the scene.  Although some DSLRs can take five or more exposures when bracketed, the camera that I used, the Canon 600D can only take three exposures. As it was late afternoon, the sources of interest that I gravitated towards involved the golden hour light. The sun was setting at this point, so I thought the rich and warm colours would help contribute to a great final photograph.

The RAW files for each photograph were stacked in Adobe Photoshop through the ‘Merge to HDR’ function. As the shots were handheld, I ticked ‘Remove Ghosting’ and changed the mode to ‘32 bit’, which allowed me to tone the stacked files in Adobe Camera Raw. The sky was extremely overexposed with no colour or cloud detail present. I lowered the 'Exposure' by '2.75' stops to bring back this information. Although this solved one problem, it darkened the fore and middle ground too much. Too counteract this, I lightened the shadows by ‘+35’ to help balance it out. I then lowered the 'Contrast' by ‘-10’, increased the 'Clarity'  by ‘+40’ and included a simple S-Curve to further balance out the image. Although I wanted to remove shadows, I didn't want to remove them entirely.
There is a plethora of colour and vibrancy during the golden hour and I want to ensure that this is properly represented. I increased the 'Saturation' by ‘+15’ and the 'Vibrance' by ‘+30’ to introduce more colour and intensity back into the image. I fine-tuned this by increasing the separate colour values in the ‘Saturation’ and ‘Luminance’ sub-menus. Finally, I included a minute amount of sharpening and removed ‘Chromatic Aberrations’After I had finished toning the photograph in ACR, I felt that the foreground was slightly too dark for my liking. To remedy this, I utilised the ‘Dodge’ tool with the brush set to ‘514’ to cover a wide area, and the ‘Exposure’ set to ‘45%’. I didn’t want to overkill it; just enough to brighten up the shadows and further balance out the photograph.



I am extremely pleased with the final result as although this is my first proper attempt at HDR photography, I feel that it’s solid attempt. The stand out features of this photograph is the silhouette of the tree, especially when it sits in front of the golden hour sky. This photograph is far from perfect as I feel that the colour in the foreground isn’t correct which I feel is due to the ‘-2’ exposure I utilised. 

I will be uploading the remaining photographs from the photo walk over the following weeks. Make sure to sign up for the email list to keep up to date and be informed of each blog that I upload. Thank you!

Blog Notes

Trey Ratcliff: http://www.stuckincustoms.com/
B&H - An Introduction to HDR Photography: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3CPavb2NWs
B&H - Creating the Realistic HDR Image: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeG9Wm0-yXw



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