As I’m sure you know, high dynamic range (HDR) photography has been popular for quite a few years. I’ve played around with it now and then but I’ve never had what I would call great success at it. One of my old posts shows an HDR shot of the Wisconsin Capitol Building at night. My goal has been to get good natural looking photos in situations where the light is too extreme for a camera to capture it in a single so-called normal exposure. It seems like a lot of photographers like to use HDR to get some intensely colorful and unreal looking images. I do enjoy some of those photos but that’s not usually my goal when I attempt an HDR image.
It’s recommended that you use a tripod when taking the set of images needed for HDR but I almost always handhold my camera (Canon 7D). I set it up to take three images in rapid fire when I press the shutter button once and I’ve saved the settings as one of my custom settings. I usually have the exposures set at -2 and +2 stops from the normal exposure. The normal exposure that I use is not necessary what the light meter suggests. For example, if I’m photographing a scene dominated by light, bright colors my exposures might actually be -1, +1, and +3.
The first HDR software that I used was Photomatix. I thought that it worked fairly well; the latest update is especially good. Since I keep reasonably up-to-date with Photoshop, I’ve tried its HDR function as well. I’ve had less success in getting what I want with Photoshop than with Photomatix. More recently I decided to try Nik HDR Efex Pro 2. The reason for this is I’ve used Nik’s Viveza for a couple of years and really like the u-point control technology. From my limited experience I would say that I’ve had better luck on some HDRs with Photomatix and better luck on others with HDR Efex Pro. Sorry to say, but Photoshop’s HDR has not worked well for me.
Well, that’s enough rambling on about HDR, some examples are shown below. You can click on them to see them enlarged.