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HDR landscapes
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I’m not sure if this has been discussed but I wanted to start a debate on HDR for landscapes to see what the current opinion is.
It has long been acknowledged that cameras (film or digital) are unable to record as much detail from a single exposure as the eye can see. Hence the interest recently in HDR and new advanced sensors with higher latitude or dynamic range.
However, my own thoughts on the matter revolve around the key point that the eye doesn’t see like a camera in that it can’t “see” the whole frame in a single view. The eye scans across small parts of the scene and varies the iris to control the light intensity.
So in many ways neither the HDR image or the single exposure is really how the eye “saw it”. In in effect, both are un-natural. This debate carries forward to the idea of next generation sensors. Do you think that in the future we will have to “hide” or surpress shadow detail rather than bring it out in order to produce natural looking images?
Interested in your thoughts.
Andy
Interesting point Andy.
I’ve grappled with “blown highlights” issue since I got my first ND grad filter. The point is that the eye cannot pick out crisp cloud edges in a bright sky i.e. highlights are blown in real life. If you don’t believe this is true then hold a 2 or 3 stop filter against a bright sky and see how much clearer the clouds become. However, in dusky light the eye can see detail in the sky and, after adjustment, pick out features in the dull foreground. In this situation we use a grad filter so that the camera can record sky and foreground.
So what should we do? Are we actually trying to record a faithful image? Perhaps not. In our search for “perfection” we are trying to produce a work of art; an illusion; a scene that is even better than the one in front of the camera when the photo was taken. We frame our shot carefully so that pylons and rubbish are outside the shot, we wait hours days and weeks for the right light, we certainly don’t record traffic noise or aeroplanes and we endure the sea-spray, or cold, or heat, or midges, or rain, so that our viewers don’t have to.
HDR may allow us to improve the illusion, but ultimately it’s just a tool in our armoury like a new brush for a painter or a new chisel for a sculptor.
And when it comes to the crunch, it is ourselves we are trying to satisfy (and maybe others like us i.e. other photographers). We have probably all impressed non-photographers with a photo that we would hide in embarrassment from “experts”. Highlights blown to shreds, foregrounds so dark that your black ink would dry up printing them, flash shadows that look like painted silhouettes… but most viewers just see the bits they like.
Realy interesting point Andy.
I don’t think I have ever seen a photograph that captured what the eye saw. I’d love to see one. Just for the craic. Surely we all try to capture what we think we saw. HDR is so badly done in 99.9% of cases, that I have seen, it gives the process a bad name. I have seen it done subtly and it works for me but it still is not as the eye saw it. The eye is less tolerent, at a given moment in time, than any camera and has less latitude.
We can create a vision of a scene in our heads but that is a conglomerate of different eye movements and imagination. I have often wondered if everyones eyes sees different colours and perspective. We’ll never know for sure I guess.
For photographers that don’t have the CS2 HDR capabilites, if you secure your cameras’ composition with a tripod, then take two or three bracketed exposures keeping the camera in exactly the same position you can make these into layers in photoshop (or psp) and use bits of one layer say 1 stop under for sky and possibly bits of the one stop over for more shadow detail. Be sure not to create a flattened effect just use the extra detail in the bracketed shots using your ‘correct’ exposure shot as a reference.
Talking of increased dynamic range, I am sure true 16bit per channel chips/processing will eventually reach the D-SLR market (Most D-SLR are 12 or 14 bit that are tranposed to 16bit), in the Digital backs you get a true 16 bit per channel and as they can take practically any landscape and still have a bit of dynamic range on either end to spare!
Andy if landscapes are your thing and you are particular about highlight and shadow detail, then invest in a digital back, and MF camera, second hand ones appear from time to time decent 16MP/22MP ones.
If budgets don’t stretch, then a very good D-SLR in RAW mode should capture enough d-range, try as I mentioned above but one exposure for the sky and one for the ground, then blend/edit/erase between the two shots as layers in photoshop, it’s like using a graduated filter but without the limiting obvious linear band across your image, you can make the transitions more subtle…
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