Confessions of a Compact Camera Shooter: Get Professional Quality Photos with Your Compact Camera

Chapter XIII. Expand Your Vision with HDR Imaging

The image you see here of a Buddhist temple near my home in Westchester, New York, is actually the end result of combining three photographs of the same scene and processing them digitally. It took about five minutes to create one high dynamic range (HDR) image with a bit of a Levels adjustment in Photoshop Elements.

HDR photography captures a much wider, that's right, dynamic range, than a straight out-of-the camera-image. What's more, HDR images tend to look more artistic and creative than straight shots ... in my opinion anyway.

I use Photomatix Pro (www.hdrsof.com), which is one of several HDR imaging programs, to create my HDR images.

Let's start the HDR fun!

Take at Least Three Shots

Here are the three photographs that I took of the scene. One was taken at the 0 exposure compensation. This means that I took the image at the camera-recommended exposure setting. Then I took two additional exposures: one at +2 and one at the −2 exposure compensation setting.

Covering that wide of an exposure range, I was sure to capture both the highlight (sky) and shadow (rock) details that I wanted to see in my final image.

The +/− bracketing technique that I used for my temple image is not set in stone for all HDR images. Sometimes you need to take more ...