A friend of mine just pointed me to some of the amazing work that’s going on right now in relation to High Dynamic Range Imaging (HDRI). Needless to say, I was intrigued and decided to take a couple photos and give it a shot.Before I describe how I shot and prepared this photograph, let me see if I can give a quick and dirty description of what’s going on here.
Typical cameras (both analog and digital) only have a certain dynamic range they can describe–meaning there is a fixed range between the brightest white and the darkest black. In the real world the ratio of light to dark looking with our eyes is often 10,000 to 1–we perceive the brightest portion to be 10,000 times brighter than the darkest. However with cameras, and especially digital cameras, you’re lucky to capture a dynamic range of 4000 to 1. In practice you might only get a dynamic range of 2500 to 1. With HDR, you theoretically have an infinite dynamic range (really limited only by the device you’re using to display the image).
As a result of this limited ability of cameras to capture the full dynamic range of a scene, most photographs we see never show everything that our eyes can see. Think of taking a birthday photograph at night on a restaurant patio. With the flash from the camera, you’ll probably get all the people properly exposed, but you probably won’t be able to see much else in the background (and the picture won’t generally look exactly like you remember it). Imagine if you could see all your friends, the people at the next table and the cars and businesses across the street. HDR can deliver that experience in a single photograph. Now let’s see how this was done.