FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

Many people have asked what this is and how to do it?
basically, it's 3+ pictures taken of exactly the same thing(without movement(tripod)) at different exposure levels..
I'm not sure if a compact can do it but a SLR can.

This is what i do.. Normally +4 and -4
you take 9 different shots always keeping your F number/aperture the same and just adjusting the shutter speed. This is because you want to keep your depth of field the same so you dont run into focus issues when merging the pics.

say for example the proper exposure through your camera metering is 125 sec at F8

You then take the - (minus/under exposures) at 250th/f8, 500th/f8, 1000th f8, 2000th F8

For the overexposures + you then shoot at 60th/f8, 30th/f8, 15th f8 and 8th f8.

As you can see the F stop is always constant. You should get away with going only 3 fstops -3 to +3

Doing this you MUST use a tripod so there is no movement inbetween shots...

Why is the F stop +60 yes the minus is -250?

well, It's the way camera lens used to be setup, the aperture on the lens usually ranged from 2.8 to F22

ie 2.8 then F4, 5.6, 8, 11 and finally F22. With modern digital camera's this is set inside the camera and apertures can range anywhere in between the above settings as well as on the nose. In the same way shutter speeds went from 8th sec, 15th, 30th, 60th, 125th, 250th, 500th and 1000th , each increase was known as 1 stop !

The minus is 250 because you are aiming to under expose (-) so if the proper exposure was 125th sec at F8 by increasing the shutter speed you are effectively letting less light hit the camera sensor and the image will be underexposed by whats known as 1 stop. With a 60th sec its slower and you are letting more light in hence its over exposure (+)

Has you camera got an auto bracket feature?, if not set for correct exposure and allow enough either side of your set shutter speed so you can then manually take the other pics increasing and decreasing the shutter speeds while leaving the Aperture constant.

A quickway... set your camera on auto and take a note of the shutter speed and aperture. Then go to manual and dail these in. Then adjust your shutter speed at 1 stop intervals +3 and _3 so 7 shots in total or if you feel really brave go 4 either way. Try and keep the camera really still. If there is movement in the scene like trees blowing this will spoil the sharpness when merging all the images so try and pick a still day.

NOTE
You will need Photoshop or some other program capable of merging all the images toghetr to make a HDR picture...

Ok now my brain is frazzled.. Think i'll go stare at my plants

Thanks for this, I love HDR stuff. I'll just toss my method in:

On most (if not all) DSLRs you can choose how much to over/under expose. Usually it will be a button or setting with this symbol:


I usually set my tripod and camera up using "aperture priority" (big green A on the settings), no flash etc. and take one shot with the exposure compensation at 0. I make sure the white balance and median brightness of the picture is what I'm looking for. Once I get the middle picture dialed in I shoot 3 photos under exposed and 3 photos over exposed.

I don't like really overdone HDR photos. Here are some of my results:

Thanks 95!
I like your first picture, great sharpness, almost 3D.
Not feeling the second one.. Too much saturation for me?

Ron.

Thanks!

The issue with the second one was the different colored lights behind the pillars. I think the top one is actually more saturated, but there's a white balance issue with the second. I agree with you though, I love the depth the top one has. One of my favorite pictures of my car...and I have a lot of those.

I just finished another from my last set of pictures I took. I didn't quite feel that this fit in with the normal plants since I feel it's on the edge of "photo-realism"

Nice colours but I don't know what to look at, the composition is a bit distracting.

Thought I would bump this to the top since I've been playing around with my camera more lately. I found a pretty nice, free HDR software that gives me more options (and I think better results) than just photoshop CS4. The software I've been using is Luminance HDR and then I drop the tone-mapped LDR into phtoshop and do a little cleanup from the tone-mapping process (cleaning halos, ghosting etc.). Here are some of my recent results.

Early srping sunset in Aurora, CO (off my front porch)


2007 SLK55 AMG at dusk

Very nice, Blake! Thanks for posting them.

Very nice pics!

Here's 1 to bump up the thread. I used to do some simple HDR photos too, lately I haven't got time for outdoor photography

It's a "love it" or "hate it" technique coz some viewer dislike the non realistic effect.

I think I like it. Thanks for all the info!