HDR for Every Day

How can you get great color photographs in the middle of the day? Read this post to find out.

We landscape photographers tend to avoid photographing during the middle of a sunny day.  The light is harsh with no color.  We prefer golden hour or twilight.

But there are times when we have no choice as to when we can shoot.  When we’re on vacation with family we can’t wait until sunset at every location that sparks our interest.  So we get the shot and hope for the best.  But there’s a technique we can use that will greatly enhance our chances of capturing a more compelling photograph.

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Exercising Your Creative Muscle

Describes an exercise to develop your eye for seeing compositions.

Remember when you first started driving?  Just about everything you did behind the wheel was a conscious act – steering into a curve, breaking for a red light, backing out of the garage, whatever.  Everything required a conscious effort.  But now, those things are all automatic and you can safely drive from point A to point B without even once thinking about the physical act of driving.  It’s a part of you.

If you learned to play a musical instrument you went through the same process.  I played piano and at first had to think about every key I pressed.  But as time went by it wasn’t which key needed to be pressed any more but how to interpret the phrase.  The fingers automatically went to where they were supposed to go.

Athletes also experience the same thing.  For example a tennis player at first needs to concentrate on every part of a backhand swing or a serve.  But after a while it it all becomes muscle memory.

The single most important thing that causes this effect to happen is frequent practice, usually daily.

But what does this have to do with photography?  Well, this applies on two levels and I’m specifically referring to photography in the field.  The first is the operation of our instrument, our camera.  At first things such as exposure, focus, depth of field, filtration, etc. are all conscious acts.  And this doesn’t touch on all the additional functionality modern digital cameras provide such as highlight tone priority, high ISO noise reduction and on and on.

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Kodachrome Basin State Park, Utah

I took a side trip to Kodachrome Basin State Park this afternoon.  What a cool place.

(c) 2009 by Ralph Nordstrom

The park is famous for it’s columns of cemented sandstone that stretch in come cases hundreds of feet into the air.  Geologists believe that they were once hot springs like those in Yellowstone and that they cooled off and filled with sediment.  Then the earth around them eroded, leaving them standing there.  They call them ‘sand pipes’ and the park has over sixty of them.

(c) 2009 by Ralph Nordstrom

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2009 Orange County Fair Awards

I was fortunate enough to have all three photographs accepted for the Orange County Fair this year.  And I was very surprised to learn that all three had won awards.  To today I finally made it out to the fair and sure enough they all had ribbons.

Death Valley Reflections had an Honorable Mention ribbon.

Bristlecone Moon also had an Honorable Mention ribbon.

And Virgin River and the Watchman had a 2nd Place ribbon.

You can see more of my work at http://RalphNordstromPhotography.com

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High Dynamic Range Processing

High Dynamic Range or HDR has become a standard and often used tool when I’m in the field.  For example, a few weeks ago when I was shooting sunrises in Bryce Canyon we would arrive well before sunrise.  Generally I would start shooting when it was light enough to get a good exposure at 30 second, ISO 100 and f/16.  That’s a good 20 to 30 minutes before the sun peeks over the horizon.  In that wonderful pre-sunrise light the dynamic range is very low, maybe a total of four or five stops.  There is no need for HDR because under those circumstances I can get a good 8 and if I want 9 stops of dynamic range from my sensor.

But as soon as the sun is above the horizon all that changes.  The dynamic range jumps to at least 8 stops, probably more.  (I don’t take the time to scintifically measure the dynamic range because things happen so fast in those first few minutes.)  I don’t want to take any chances with that incredible light so I switch to HDR, just for insurance if nothing else.

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Zion Canyon Journal – Session 2

Well, as anticipated, I didn’t particularly like the print from last night.  I seem to be having a problem with creating images that are way too cool in the shadows.  So, how best to warm up the shadows?

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Zion Canyon Journal – Session 1

What I’d like to do is keep a journal of the steps I go through and the decisions I make when creating the Zion Canyon print.  It was shot on 11/24/2007 near the Great White Thrown turnout.  I was there the day before closer to sunset and realized this shot needed to be taken about an hour earlier.  So I came back at 4:15 the following day.  The shot required both stitching (vertical panorama shots) and HDR (three exposures bracketed at +/- 1 stop) for a total of six shots.

The image was shot down by the Virgin River although it’s not in the picture.  The foreground is a meadow in the shade with two cottonwood trees.  The middle ground is a Navajo sandstone cliff jutting in from the right, also in the shade.  The background is a tall cliff, also Navajo sandstone, that is still catching some sunlight.  The sky is cloudless and blue.

Here then are the steps I’m going through to take these six shots from RAW to a finished print.  It will probably not be completed today.  Sorry I can’t show the before and after of each step.  That would be interesting.

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