Mastering High Dynamic Range Photography [BOOK REVIEW]

Mastering High Dynamic Range Photography

This book naturally follows on Michael Freeman’s other book on night and low light photography, but I have to admit that I approached it — and the subject of HDR — with quite a degree of apprehension. For me the whole topic of HDR and the results it produces are, in some cases, a bit of a let-down: the need for an extended dynamic range in photography is based upon the eye’s prodigious ability to see a range of brightness in a scene that no camera can capture. But isn’t that the role of the photographer? To interpret and reproduce an impression of the scene — not to record it exactly as it is?

Author Michael Freeman explains early in the book that “Scenes vary in their range of brightness and the ones that cause most trouble for photography are those in which the highlights are much brighter than those in the shadows.” To achieve this, he approaches the subject with precision and enormous technical know-how; it helps if you have a foreknowledge of light and colour theory.

Freeman also makes the point that there is no reason why future camera sensors could not capture a much wider range of brightness than they do … if so, the need for HDR would be a thing of the past.

One camera — and only one — has already arrived there: the extraordinary SpheroCamHDR panoramic camera already captures images in 32-bit resolution and with a dynamic range in excess of five orders of magnitude — or 26 f stops.
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