Story Bridge by Night

So I am learning all about HDR imaging since a friend cursed me with awareness of it's existence a few days ago. Basically it is a way to get lots and lots of images that have a low dynamic range (think EVERY artificial picture you see on TV computers cameras etc) and combine them to make a high dynamic range image.

What the hell am I talking about. Well think of it this way. If I took my camera and took a photo of the story bridge at night with the city behind it, I can have a quick exposure which will show the illuminated bridge and city, but anything that is in partial darkness will just come out black. If on the other hand I took a long exposure, I can resolve low light areas like the park under the bridge, but anywhere there is bright light just overexposes and looks crap.

The pic below shows you the two extremes of the exposures. The dark one shows an exposure that resolves the details of the illuminated areas, but leaves the unlit areas unresolved. The light one resolves the detail of the unlit areas, but totally blows out the illuminated areas. Neither is good, and you just can't get anything workable in the middle either. :(


So, I take 6 exposures of lengths ranging from 1 second to 30 seconds. Then I get those imagines and use a program called Photomatix Pro to generate a HDR image. The HDR image actually contains picture data that is just too "broad" for computer monitors and TV's to display (unless you are going to pay $50K for a HDR display). So, we then do a funky little thing called tone mapping so that we can "approximate" the image back into the range that can be displayed.

The end result is a picture that shows you all of the details you would be able to see with your eyes if you were standing there at night looking at that view. Well, almost. :)



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