How do you think these images were taken?

[naomicelena]

Hello! This is my first post here.

I have a question to whoever can help me out. I can't take credit for these images. They were taken by one of my favorite blogger/photographer or everyday life images.....Karen Russell

How do you think she took these images? I just love how the focal point of the image is bright and everything else is in black. Do you think it was done via post processing?

I also saw this from her blog too...not sure if this describes how she took the images below.

5. A hard concept to understand, but I learned something new the other day...if a background is 3 stops darker than the subject you are exposing for, it will make the background in your photo appear black (I get a lot of questions about whether or not I use a black backdrop on particular photos, and although I do use one occasionally, more often, it is just a result of my background being 3 stops darker than my subject.

Thank you to whoever can help!!

Naomi

[inkista]

She's taking advantage of a high dynamic range scene, and just exposing for the highlights and losing detail in the shadow. I doubt much post-processing came into play.

I really wish people knew what "high dynamic range" actually MEANS instead of thinking it's all about a cheesy over-saturated special effect.

The dynamic range is the range between the brightest value in the scene and the darkest value. The bigger that contrast between the two points is, the larger the range is. Night shots with illumination in them are always high dynamic range because in contrast to everything else, the brightest point is REALLY bright. Same reason you don't want to shoot into the sun, but have it behind you.

The camera/monitor can only really capture/display about half of what our eyes can see in terms of dynamic range. You have to choose the portion of that range you want to expose for. With a high dynamic range, you can go for the middle of the range and get blown highlights and lost detail in shadows. You can go for the shadow and blow out high and (I'm making up a word here) midlights. Or, you can (as this photographer has done) expose for the highlights and lose the shadow details into the black. As she says, as long as there's a more than 3EV difference between the background and the subject, you can "underexpose" and get a black background.

Obviously, you could also take all three bracketed shots, and then do software magic to combine the three shots to cover and represent the entire dynamic range, and that's what HDR is designed to do. Whether you use it that way or not is entirely up to your aesthetics (or lack of them).

[teaking]

The interesting part about dynamic range well what I found interesting is that your camera actualy captures a higher dynamic range than your monitor can display and your monitor displays a higher dynamic range than can be displayed on paper. The thing that makes the illusion possible is compressing the range while keeping local contrast, in HDR tone mapping is used in raw editors its all those sliders.

But on the other hand we have saw pictures with very low dynamic range that look fantastic... its a funny old world.

[naomicelena]

Thank you so much for responding!

how do you do this exactly:"As she says, as long as there's a more than 3EV difference between the background and the subject, you can "underexpose" and get a black background."

How do you make sure that your background has a 3EV difference than the subject? I'm just starting out with photography and still learning. So i would love if you can give me a quict tutorial or step by step...if you can.

thank you so much again!!!

[jdepould]

Originally Posted by inkista

You can go for the shadow and blow out high and (I'm making up a word here) midlights.

Midtones.

You can also help this look along by raising the black clipping point in ACR. And increasing the contrast.

[inkista]

Originally Posted by naomicelena

How do you make sure that your background has a 3EV difference than the subject?

Bunch of ways with the meter, but I'd probably use the histogram.

Those vertical bars on the histogram display in your camera are the stop marks. Basically, if you have a "gap" between the peaks of the data "hills" for the background and for your subject that's more than three spaces wide, you have a >3EV difference.

Personally, I wouldn't get hung up on the >3EV numbers. Just experiment, shooting in the dark in full Manual mode, and seeing how much better underexposure makes everything, rather than relying on the camera's autoexposure mode to do everything for you.