The Woodwork

The Times has a wonderful summary article of High Dynamic Range photography.

This was a little serendipitous because I had a discussion at lunch where I heard the tired old line that “nothing new is in Photoshop since x came out” and I pointed out some of the features in CS2, of which HDR support was one of them.

(I have a strong suspicion that the article is heavily influenced by discussion on the HDR Flickr group.)

I dabbled with HDR, and I’ll probably do so again. The problem with HDR is that the photos end up looking very unnatural.

Horsetail HDR
Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, Oregon

Nikon D70, Nikon D70, 12-24mm f/4G
3 exposures (2.5″, 0.6″, 1/6″) @ f/22, iso 200, 12mm (18mm)

This was mentioned in the article and the response was:

But Ms. Joffre’s theory is that the pros’ assessments are based on photography’s traditional limitations — in effect, how people think photos should look, rather than the actual dynamic range of scenes.

“People sometimes say it doesn’t look like a photograph, it looks like a painting,” Ms. Joffre said. “But if your camera was perfect it would take an H.D.R. image.”

Why HDR being “more real” is bullshit

If it isn’t fucking obvious that there is a complete loss of contrast in an HDR shot, you need to look at more HDR shots.

The deal is that while the eye has a dynamic range of an HDR image, it does not look at a scene all at once. If I look in the shadow area, the brightness of the the sunny area is relatively greater than in an HDR shot. If I look in the bright area, the darkness of the shadow area is relatively more than in an HDR shot.

For instance, look at my Horsetail HDR shot again. When you visit a waterfall does your eye actually see that the water cascading down is blue? or does it perceive it as white?

The blue of the water was “correctly” captured by the HDR photograph, but does that make it perfect?

Should we go around taking all our photographs with no white balance corrections? No gels on our strobes? According to Ms. Joffre, we should because “if your camera was perfect” there is no need to correct for color. That color is reality, and our eyes are lying to us.

Photography as an art

An yet, our eyes are the final arbiter of taste. Photography is not engineeering; it is an art. And like an art, it constantly strives to express the world around them not as it is, but as it means.

Look again at my photograph. If I wanted to express this waterfall as it is seen by my eye, I’d have dropped the frame rate down to 1/30 of a second to get the same blurring that my eye sees. But as a photographer, I chose not to. I found the waterblur aesthetically pleasing.

This is why for nature shots, I prefer digital blending.

Redwoods and West Berry Creek
Big Basin State Park, Santa Cruz Mountains, California

Nikon D70, Nikkor 12-24mm f/4G
(3 exposures at 1/4″, 1.3″ and 3″) @ f/16, iso 200, 12mm (18mm)

Digital blending is my way of doing HDR. It is saying, “Well, here is the light and shadow that paints this photograph and I don’t have this sort of dynamic range on my monitor (or on paper). I choose to digitally blend things to express how the light painted this scene.”

Another person chooses to purchase a gradient ND filter. You may choose to use HDR to express that. That’s fine.

But your preference is an artistic decision and not one about “perfection” or “actual dynamic range.”

That cameras can record a scene without the need of a photographer is an amateur’s wet dream. That we can attain perfection or actual in art is a myth perpetuated by the innate realism and immediacy of a photograph—one expressive medium in Art.

But as photographers, we should know better.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 3rd, 2006 at 5:36 pm and is filed under photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.