HDR Photography

Our current project is HDR photography. HDR or "high dynamic range" is a type of photography that in my opinion,  is amazing! It creates a gorgeous over-all product with a great amount of detail. What is dynamic range? Well I can tell you, it's the ratio of the light and darkness in a ratio. HDR photography uses two images at a minimum, with all of the images at different exposures. After taking your images, you can then use a computer program of your choice (in this case we used Photoshop) and you can merge them together to get an amazing final product. Some examples that would be good for a HDR photo are, landscapes and portraits. But it will only work best if your subject or main focus is still. The best time to take landscape photos, in my opinion, is either during sunrise or sunset; the golden hours. For me, I would like to make all of my pictures an HDR image because it's just so spectacular!

To create a HDR image step-by-step, you must first collect all of you images. With that said, you should set up any camera you wish, ideally on a tripod or an object to keep the camera stable. Then you set the exposure to the however dark you want the first picture to be ( I set the exposure level at -2 for my first photo), you can then move the exposure up a little, take another picture once again (remember to go up in the same increment everytime) and just repeat these steps until you are satisfied with the quantity. After your finished with taking the pictures, you can upload them to any editing program you would like. If you would like to use Photoshop, open the program, click "File" (left corner), then click the "Automate" option, then "Merge to HDR Pro". Now you can select your files and let it load. When it finishes loading, you can personalize your image if you'd like.

Above are my final HDR photos. The first image is an HDR portrait of my beautiful sister; Ilihia, the second photo is an HDR landscape, and my last image is both of the pictures combined which made a superimposed photo. The goal for our photos were surrealism, so with these images I enhanced the exposure, saturation, vibrance, and gamma effects. By doing so, I made the colors in the sky pop a little more.  For the picture of my sister, the portrait, I selected an effect that I believed looked surrealistic, I increased the amount of detail, exposure, highlights and darks, the vibrance, gamma, and saturation. For the last photo; superimposed, I cut-out the picture of my sister and placed it on top of my landscape image. I edited them both once again and added a word that matched with the over-all feeling. I really enjoyed making these photos and I hope my sister likes them!