Much like yesterday’s post, today’s photograph wouldn’t have been possible without a road closure in Dublin city centre. On this occasion, Dame Street was closed to traffic for about 20 minutes to facilitate Dublin City Council’s family cycle day. I found that event to be (photographically at least) actually a bit of a non-event, and so, with a rare lack of traffic passing in front of Bank of Ireland on College Green, one of Dublin’s iconic buildings, I took the opportunity to try a HDR shot of it.
HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, and consists of multiple shots of the same subject (ideally with an identical composition) at a number of different exposures. To get a good end result, it’s important the the scene remains unchanged, so you want no passing traffic, pedestrians etc.
For this image I made 5 exposures of the bank – one which was as the camera meter dictated, and four ranging from two stops underexposed to two stops overexposed. The idea is quite simple to understand. The underexposures bring out detail in the bright areas of the scene (the highlights), the overexposures bring out detail in the dark areas of the scene (the shadows), and the metered exposure brings out detail in the mid-tones of the scene.
Some post processing is required to merge all 5 images into one shot, and for this shot I used a tool called Photomatix. I then brought the merged result into Aperture for tweaking of the contrast and colour balance.
Had I planned in advance to take this shot, I would have brought a proper tripod with me. As it turned out I only had a lightweight compact tripod that wasn’t incredibly stable, even when I opted to position the camera near the ground on the island in the middle of Dame Street. The result was a little bit of movement between each of the exposures. Photomatix actually does a good job of aligning the images before compositing them. You’ll notice a slight painted effect on the end result – that’s a characteristic of HDR shots and can be boosted to give an ethereal almost cartoon-like feel, which can suit some subjects very well. For this subject, I kept that effect to a minimum.
I’m not sure how much I like the whole HDR concept myself yet, but I’ll keep an eye out for future subjects to play around with the concept a bit more, and no doubt I’ll post the end results here.
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