Day 15: HDR in the courtyard

Today's picture of the day isn't particularly well-composed or interesting, but I wanted to play with HDR.

Looking out from the Charles Hotel courtyard

I just wanted to get a picture of something with a huge amount of contrast so I could try out the Merge to HDR functionality that Photoshop CS2 has built in. I was further limited by the fact that I was using my point and shoot without a tripod, so I needed to have a flat surface where I could adjust the exposure compensation for every shot, but keep the camera as steady as I could.

I took 13(!) pictures with different exposure compensation values - 0, +/-0.3, +/-0.7, +/-1.0, +/-1.3, +/-1.7, and +/-2.0. The following image shows some of the bracketed pictures for comparison - click on it to view larger sizes in Flickr.


I know there's a lot of misuse of HDR out there - obvious halos, crappy tone mapping. I'm not characterizing all over-processing as bad though, because while some HDR photos don't look realistic, there's still something really neat about the more surreal photos. I'm looking forward to playing with this more in the future, though I won't make this into a primary technique. It's going to be really useful for photos where contrast masking just isn't enough to balance out the picture. I also can't wait to make some dramatic night pictures.