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HDR Photography

I have just started experimenting with HDR photography. For those who don’t know what this is, it stands for High Dynamic Range. Although I have been interested in photography for quite a while, I never heard of this until I joined the Carrick Camera Club. I heard the acronym but initially thought it was for some sort of Hard Disk Recorder. But beware – watch out for their HDR hole. The HDR Hole refers to people who HDR everything! I have seen some photographers using HDR even on portraits, which makes people’s faces look far too stark. One photo of a child in HDR was more Friday13th than a nice photo of a child. 

RTFM

I have a Fuji S7000 and in fully manual mode, I found the auto-bracketing setup … but only when I went looking for it. I had never read the manual in full, and if I did come across the auto bracketing setup, I probably didn’t know what it was used for. Having seen some photos on Flickr that did use HDR, I was unaware that this technique had been used, and started blaming the camera. I was going to switch to a Canon D450 or similar, but I think I will stick with the Fuji for a while longer. On my Canon DSLR, I have the option to shoot RAW. If you want to use HDR, I fully recommend shooting all your photos in RAW. RAW photos don’t suffer from the same problems that JPGs have if you try to adjust the exposure, highlights, or shadows.

First Attempts

My First HDR attempts are not bad and these can be seen on my Flickr Account – I have included a nice widget that links nicely to my Flickr photos, so please feel free to have a look. I have worked on HDR for a while and I can see where there is a use for it but at the same time you need to use it correctly.


Get this widget at roytanck.com