My First Attempt at HDR

[itsTylerRandall]

This is my first attempt at doing an HDR. I made this little set up in my room with a black sheet, a pole and my door hanging pullup bar. Basically made a black cave-ish type thing held up with the pole and my pullup thing. I then put my shoe in and at first I used flash, but it made the black sheet show through the light bouncing of the shiny fibers. Then I turned to my trusty tripod and set an open exposure of 30 seconds. I didn't want to bump up the ISO and lose detail so yeah.

Anyways, how did it turn out? How are the darks, textures, composition, et cetera? Is it decent for a first attempt?

For a better view of textures and details look at it through my flickr linked at the bottom.



Exif info:
Camera - Canon EOS REBEL T2i
Exposure - 30
Aperture - f/5.6
Focal Length - 50 mm
ISO Speed - 100
Exposure Bias - 0 EV
Flash - Off, Did not fire

[kcoppock]

That's not HDR, that's just a long exposure.

It's an interesting photo, but the dark edges of the shoe are a bit too dark in my opinion. This really isn't a situation where you would ever need to do HDR anyway. You want to do HDR when there is too large of a dynamic range to capture in a single exposure. For a cliche example, a bright sky against a dark forest. There's no way to capture enough detail in both areas without using multiple exposures. So you take multiple shots -- at least one for the shadows, one for the highlights, and one for the midtones -- but typically 3 to 5 shots separated by 2 EV (1 EV for JPEG). Then you can use an HDR processing software to merge these exposures into a 32-bit image, and finally, tone map the image into a 16 or 8-bit image that your display can actually render.

[itsTylerRandall]

Originally Posted by kcoppock

That's not HDR, that's just a long exposure.

It's actually both sir

It's a three layered multiple exposure HDR processed in Photoshop. In fact it is a single image which I duplicated into three layers making the dynamic ranges of 1.5, 2.4, and 3.6 through tone-mapping. You won't get that detail and dark textures from just shooting a single shot on a long exposure SOOC. That's why I said it's an HDR...because it is. Or is my understanding of a computer rendering of an HDR wrong?

[kcoppock]

Originally Posted by itsTylerRandall

It's actually both sir

It's a three layered multiple exposure HDR processed in Photoshop. In fact it is a single image which I duplicated into three layers making the dynamic ranges of 1.5, 2.4, and 3.6 through tone-mapping. You won't get that detail and dark textures from just shooting a single shot on a long exposure SOOC. That's why I said it's an HDR...because it is. Or is my understanding of a computer rendering of an HDR wrong?

I suppose it depends on how you define HDR. You probably won't get the amount of contrast that you have SOOC, but the image you posted also wasn't SOOC. With a scene like yours, you could easily get as much (I'd wager more) detail from a single exposure after post-processing using bounce flash and some curves adjustments.

I guess I would say it's tonemapped, which gives the popularized HDR look, but it's really not a High Dynamic Range image.