I’ve shot HDR(High Dynamic Range) before but never till now with my 5D MkII and never indoors too. Well, not a bad way to spend the rainy weekend indoors.
If you are wondering what the hell HDR is, let me throw some light(!) on it. The camera for sure doesn’t see the scene like our eyes does. There are various different techniques to bring the effect just like our eyes see the scene, like using Grad ND filters or just plain post-processing the image or HDR.
For shooting HDR, All you need to make sure is the same aperture setting on your camera for all the pictures you are about to shoot. And start shooting pictures with different exposure setting within a range (-1 to +1, this should be easy to figure out from the camera’s dials). The shots have to be tripod mount unless you have a bionic arm.
All the above said works, if your are shooting a controlled environment like something indoors. You can always go onto, AEB(Auto Exposure Bracketing) which tells the camera to shoot pictures in a given range. Nikon does a better job where you can have upto 9 bracketed shots when the camera is set to AEB. The 5D MkII does 3 shots and most Canon does pretty much the same except for the 1D-series where you can get upto 7 bracketed images.
My inspiration on doing HDR is the HDR guru Trey Ratcliff. Each of his image has the ‘wow’ effect in it. I just admire his work.
I know this post is going more than the 1000 word limit, just to mention that i’m aware that there is lot of post-processing involved.. All i can say is.. “Hey..it’s just a different way of looking at the world and more about adding fun”
These bracketed images can be processed with Photomatix or HDR EFex Pro or Adobe CS5.
Here are the shots. And also here is how a single exposure(or a non-HDRed shot) looks like.
Picture Info: 9 shots ranging from -1.3 to +1.3 exposure range. Tripod mount. Post-Processing Info: Images combined with Photomatix, White balance corrected with Adobe LR3 and played with Contrast, brightness, Vibrance & Saturation with CS5.
Thanks for stopping by… 🙂
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