High-Dynamic Range photography is a useful technique to capture scenes you otherwise couldn’t capture in a single exposure. It’s a technique that’s best applied while on a tripod, though you can get away with handheld HDR when your shutter speeds are fast enough. For photographic disciplines like landscape and architectural photography, HDR is a powerful tool to help capture a scene with the most information possible for post-processing.
The only cost to shooting HDR -- besides the camera and lens -- is the processing software. And there are loads of them; Lightroom/Photoshop, Photomatix, Aurora HDR, or Darktable. I regularly use Lightroom as my main HDR processor because I like the way it merges the exposures and it’ll give you finer control of the overall look. It doesn’t have batch processing but for the amount of HDRs that I output it’s fine.
Shooting HDR
Let’s do a quick equipment check first. What you’ll need is a camera with continuous bracket shooting (if your camera doesn’t offer this you can just adjust your shutter speed to create the separate exposures), a tripod (though you can get away with handheld HDRs when your shutter speeds are fast enough), and, optionally, a wireless shutter release cable or remote.
With your camera now setup on your tripod, let’s set it up for continuous bracketing.
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If you shoot Canon
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If you shoot Olympus
Let’s get to the shooting now. Frame up your composition and take the photos. Now you’ll have a minimum of 3 separate exposures with one stop of light difference between them (one at -1, one at 0, and one at +1).
Process an HDR
In this write up I’m going to be using Lightroom CC 2019 to process this HDR. It’s my DAM of choice because it offers so many tools to speed up my workflow without having to open up another program.
After firing up Lightroom, import your bracket set and only apply a simple lens correction profile.
Next, select the bracket set and click on the 'Photo' tab and select Photo Merge > HDR. I usually set the deghost to none, turn off auto-tune, and leave auto-align on.
With your HDR processed, now we can go and tune the processed image to look the way we want it too. What looks right is subjective so you’ll want to play around with the adjustment sliders to get an image you like. I tend to lean toward a more natural representation of the scene, but it’s all about intent — what do you want to say and how do you want the viewer to feel.
There you go, now you know how to shoot an HDR. The technique is simple, but the post processing can be a bit touchy because you can easily edit too much and make the photo look heavily unnatural. Check back soon for my flash photography write up and follow up video on how to shoot HDRs. Hope you learned something, and if you have any questions, please feel free to comment below or send me an email at hello@georgemoua.com