The only problem that I have with HDR is that it takes all the skill away from photo taking...as long as you cna have a camera on a tripod and push a few buttons you can take an amazing picture... Doesn't anybody long for the days that photography was more of an art? When you could over and under expose parts of an image when developing it in the lab by moving your hand under the developing light, and so on...
Have you looked at this thread? Or tried to do some of these shots? It's much harder to get right than it looks. However, one thing we will probably agree on is that digital photography allows you to take a shot, see if it's any good right away, shoot again, and repeat until you like the result. But this isn't specific to HDR ...
Dunno what happened here. The stuff in the foreground looks A LOT worse in the full sized one. I took about 9 braketed shots and they all ended up coming out like this. Too much noise? They were handheld which might not help Image Unavailable, Please Login
No, it's not that easy. I have seen billions of HDR's and probably just a few I would consider "amazing". most due to extreme local contrast manipulations have just awful color and composition they rely solely on the "wow" of the technology. And many which are technically well put together look very saccharine, like motivational posters or Kinkade paintings. so it seems very hard, not easy, to do something amazing with HDR as opposed to normal single exposure shots. I also think techniques similar to HDR were around in years ago like those using gradated density filters which keeps skies from being overexposed in landscape photography. I suppose the method could be used well for hyperrealistic, heightened reality effects, like recreating the atmosphere of a George Tooker or deChirico painting, but it has to be put in the hands of someone with a good sense of what to do and who can do something interesting. Or if someone just wants more dynamic range they can try using HDR to a limited extent. what is wrong with increasing the range of what is possible? after all the old technology is always still available...
HDR photography is digital art. Sure it was much harder to do without digital cameras. But, people also used to have cows out back and milked em when they wanted to make butter. Or have some milk. Progress ownsj00.
It's not quite the same thing since the result will still only contain data within the dynamic range of the sensor. But yes. I love graduated NDs. Pretty much the only filters I ever use (unless I'm shooting into water). If I remember correctly, I used a 0.4 grad ND on this one. An HDR version would clearly show the trees. Image Unavailable, Please Login