The Camera Technical

To-Do Date: Apr 19 at 11:59pm

To use this HDR process you will need a tripod, or steady surface, a camera that allows you to set an exposure bracket or manual controls to adjust your own exposure.

Using a tripod find a scene that has bright highlights and deep shadows.  This is my example:

  

Use the bracket exposure options on your camera to make  at least 3 photos of the scene.  Or if you don't have an exposure bracket option, use your meter to make at least 3 photos that all  have different exposures (some over, one right on and some under).  If you use the exposure bracket setting your camera will take 1 exposure based on the average reading of your meter and 1 or 2 underexpose and 1 or two overexposed image. In my example above the brightness from the window made an overexposed image that caused the wall to go black and loose all detail.  The more photos with different exposures you combine the more details you will get in the final image.

Once I combined my bracket of three images in Photoshop this is the image I got.

  

Maybe not the most exciting image but you can see detail on the walls.  I could have made this even better by making another exposure that darkened the highlight area down to see detail in that area and using that in my photo merge.

See the next section for the Photoshop portion.