HDR

High Dynamic Range. Sounds good, right?

This is a an example of one of the few sorts of scenes I can really imagine wanting to take that actually has a high dynamic range. This is taken straight into a glaring sunrise with the foreground in complete silhouette. It was deliberately massively, mind-blowingly overexposed so that I could retain some of that foreground detail which, honestly, it would have been difficult to see clearly with my own eyeballs in that light.

Most scenes that are high contrast are unattractive and make bad photographs. These sorts of scenes usually look ugly in real life so it is the height of optimism to expect them to magically look great in a photo. In cases like the above where a scene has very high contrast but DOES look good we normally want to convey that high contrast feeling in the photo. This usually means letting a foreground darken to a black silhouette or letting the brightness of the bright parts burn to white.

Most HDR photographs that are successful celebrate the unreality that usually comes from excessive use of HDR software on massively high dynamic range scenes. This is, in fact, it's own artistic style. It's not a style I like but it certainly has quite a following.

I mostly shoot negative film. This capture medium has the capability to capture huge dynamic range in a single exposure. It also has very good properties at the extremes of its range. It "rolls off" organically (like our eyes do) and never "clips". This particular film, Kodak Ektar, may be the highest dynamic range capture medium on the planet which is why there is so much detail available in this crazily over-exposed scene. But most of the time, this extra latitude is best used to remove the worry about missing a shot through incorrect exposure. I do shoot carefully but with negative film I feel an extra confidence that when I press the shutter the shot is in the can.