Dublin Camera Club meets every Tuesday night, usually in the club’s premises on Camden Street in Dublin, but in place of this week’s meeting the club organized a field trip to the War Memorial Gardens in Islandbridge. I went along with many others, and finding the light quite flat, and at times quite dull, and the sky quite grey, I found the need to get inventive with my photography in order to come away with some nice images.
I’ll post some of those images here over the next few days, starting today with this wide-angle shot of the centre-piece of the gardens – a water feature below the level of the rest of the site, surrounded by circular walkways and flower beds, which form a maze-like path around it. It is one of the few big features in the gardens, and also just about the first sight we came to, so I suspect it was well photographed on Tuesday evening. The challenge for each of us was to get a shot a little different from everyone else’s.
I had something up my sleeve – or rather in my bag – to help me with that goal, and regular readers won’t be surprised to know that upon seeing it I was reaching for my fisheye lens. But even those of you who might be thinking “not another fisheye shot” will hopefully appreciate that the photograph above is composed so as to minimize distortion and use the fisheye lens as a wide angle lens rather than for it’s distinctive distorting look.
On a side note, one of my fellow photographer’s was using a Sigma 10-20mm lens and capturing images with a similar wide angle feel. We did a comparison of the same scene (this water feature from the other side) with my fisheye and his Sigma and confirmed that the 10.5mm fisheye took in a wider view than the Sigma at 10mm, while I was very impressed with how little distortion the Sigma introduced.
Getting a wide sweeping view was only going to get me half way to a shot with a difference. I mentioned the light was awful, and this was particularly so when the frame was half filled by sky, which it kind of had to be in my case to keep the horizon relatively straight – remember that lines which go through the centre of the frame will stay straight when shot with the fisheye lens.
With the camera on matrix metering – where it meters the entire scene – it produced an exposure which was good for the foreground but had the sky overexposed. Conversely if I exposed for the sky, the foreground went way too dark. Basically, the dynamic range of the scene was too much for the camera’s sensor to handle.
A good time, then, to put back into practice a technique I rarely use, but often mean to. It was time for some High Dynamic Range photography.
I’ve used HDR before with mediocre results, and one key thing that was made clear to me on that occasion was the absolute importance of keeping the camera in the exact same position between each exposure that will make up the final shot. In case you don’t already know, HDR images are achieved by merging multiple exposures of the same scene, each shot at the same aperture and with different shutter speeds, to expose for the shadows, the midtones and the highlights. Software to merge the images can weight pixels from each of the contributory exposures to produce an image which has detail throughout the scene, thereby increasing the dynamic range of the shot. Hence the name.
I had no tripod, but instead put the camera on the ground, near the edge of the top step, and it stayed rock steady throughout the exposures, making the merging process back at my computer much easier.
You can use as little as three exposures for HDR, and usually an odd number overall, with the middle exposure being the one that is closest to “correct” for the scene. In this case I shot nine, ranging from 1/4000s to 1/8s, each a stop apart (i.e. each one doubled the light falling on the sensor), but only used five to create the final exposure (those which were two stops apart). As an exercise I did a second merge using all nine and there was virtually no difference between the results.
I used the Photomatix HDR plugin in Aperture to merge the images, and I’m very pleased with the result. From the detail in the stone to the colour of the flowers to the drama of the sky, using this technique has helped me produced an image that I could not have generated in any other way, and hopefully helped it become one that stands out from the crowd.
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