An Attempt at HDR Photography

This week, I had a work meeting/party at my boss’s cottage on Lake Michigan.  I thought it would be a good time to play around with the digital camera and give HDR Photography a try.  HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography “is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of exposures (the range of values between light and dark areas) than normal digital imaging techniques.” (Full Wiki article here).  The basic process for creating and HDR photo is to take multiple pictures of the same scene with different exposure settings, and then using software to merge and tone map the individual files.  For my first attempt, I used three exposure settings – one with regular/normal exposure, one over exposed and one under exposed.

For the first example, I snapped three pictures of the water and coast line.  Taking pictures of the water was a little more difficult than the second example I found because the water moves.  So, even though the three pictures are taken in rapid succession, the scene still changes slightly which makes the merging of the pictures not as crisp.  I used a tripod and a DIY remote trigger that allowed me to snap the pictures without bumping the camera.  The Canon Rebel XT has an Auto Exposure Bracketing setting to take -2EV, 0EV, and +2EV pictures automatically at 3 fps (full instructions here).  However, as long as your camera allows you to adjust the exposure settings, you can create HDR photos with it (a tripod is highly recommended in that case).

Above are the initial three pictures with the normal exposure on the left, over exposed in the middle, and under exposed on the right.

After I took the pictures, I loaded them into Qtpfsgui which is free tool for merging and tone mapping the images.  Once loaded, I was able to tweak some of the settings and come up with the image below.  The software has a ton of options, most of which I have no idea what they are or what exactly they do.  So, for this attempt, I just played around with different settings to see what looked good.  After I generated the HDR photo, I made one small edit in Gimp to remove the lens flare that was in the middle of each of the three pictures.

 
(click to enlarge)

For my second attempt, I basically just turned around to take a picture of the tree line and cottage (which you can barely see through all the trees).  This turned out a little bit better, I think, because it was a calm day, so there wasn’t any movement between each picture.

I used the same process as the first time to merge the files together and came up with the image below.  I love how vibrant the sky and beach grass turned out in this one.  The tree line, however, almost seems a little over processed to me and I might go back and play around with the settings when I get bored.

(click to enlarge)

For more non-HDR pictures from our work party, visit our photo gallery.