Last weekend we had a very nice weekend in Valdres, in a little mountain cabinvillage of Vaset. For the last six months I have been playing with the idea of putting together an HDR (High Dynamic Range) photo of a sunset or similar. This weekend I brought my old Canon 45d with my new Sigma 10-20mm (f3.5) and the sturdy tripod. Most of the weeken had fog and snow to offer but suddenly on the Saturday the light came out and we got a bit of sun! Quickly I configured my camera to lock the Aperture (to ensure stability in depth of focus) and setup the AEB (Auto Exposure Bracketing) to take three photos. One would be normal exposure, one -2 steps and one +2 steps (underexposed and overexposed). The pohoto was taken on the tripod to ensure total alignment between the three, and of course I used the 2sec selftimer to get the picture with being totally hands off the camera.
What is the point of HDR? Well the point is that the overexposed photo will have some details that the underexposed will not and vice versa. So when you stack and align all these photos you get a much deeper detail both in the contrast and color spectrum. For instance the normal JPEG you would shoot is 8bit, a proper HDR is 32bit and contains a whole world of details you never could get with JPEG. When I shoot with my canon I always use the RAW files to get as much details as I can and not loose anything in the process. The only time I use JPEG is for the final export when all the work is completed.
So how did it turn out? Well here you can see the three orinigal images:
I took these three photos into Photomatix Pro 5, algined them and did some very minor tweaking of the image. After this I saved it to a 16bit TIFF file (127 MB large!) and opened it in Adobe Lightroom 5.3 for a bit of post processing. Here I just adjusted the exposure a bit, contrast and saturation. The aim was to get a photo with both details in the shadows as-well as in the light. The final export is this image:
