Fort Worth In HDR
by Kevin BuchananHDR - High Dynamic Range - Photography involves a bit more work than just aiming and pressing the shutter button. For the uninitiated, HDR photography is the technique of taking multiple photos of a subject with different exposures (allowing different amounts of light onto the camera’s sensor), then blending those separate exposures with a computer to get one photo with a much higher range of definition in light and shadow than is possible with a single photo. A camera can’t see as wide a range of light at once as the human eye - so, if done realistically, these blended exposures can get photography closer to what the eye sees. In effect, you’re making areas of the photo that would otherwise be under or over exposed look correct. You can also go really nuts and make very unreal looking images, but I’ve gone for realism.
It can be a little tricky - significant moving objects tend to fluster the HDR blending software, and a tripod is pretty much essential, since each exposure must be from an identical angle and position for the technique to work.
Here are seven HDR photos I’ve taken in downtown Fort Worth. All were taken with my Canon PowerShot G9, and all are the result of three exposures blended in a piece of software called Photomatix Pro. Click on each for a bigger view.
Tags: architecture, city, downtown, hdr, photo, Photography, pic, urban
3 Comments, Comments or Pings
Herb Kavanaugh
Beautiful pictures. Lots of changes since I lived there in 1962. For the Sundance picture, I don’t remember seeing any trees around downtown at all in my day except maybe for the park across the street from the old City Hall. The tree shown in the Sundance picture looks huge and must have been planted fully grown.
herb
May 23rd, 2008
Kevin
Herb,
I believe most of the street trees downtown are of a late ’70s/early ’80s vintage, from around the time that Sundance Square started its earliest stages.
May 23rd, 2008
john
I really love the technique. Someday, I’ll try it out myself! In that second photo (and one other as well), I wish you could see street level as well as the sky. Is there a way to do HDR if you have to do stitching? For example, say you took your first exposure at street level and then the same exposure where you could see the sky and then stitched those together in Photoshop. You would do the next two HDR exposures the same way. Is this technique possible?
Jul 30th, 2008
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