HDR Portraits

A post that may be too technical from a Photography stand point.

Someday time permitting, will break this down in layman terms.. Until then, my apologies.

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It is no secret that I love HDR photography.

Now that there is Photoshop CS5 and the HDR plugin, don't have to worry about playing around with demo versions of Photomatix (which is awesome compared to CS5 with the controls and presets though) and can get photographs merged and tonemapped without a watermark!

Usually HDR photos are of landscapes and still subjects simply because the ghost effect is not easy to take advantage of in many compositions.

That is why you do not see many Portraits in HDR. The subject has to stay reasonably still for a long time. Time to take at least three shots (normal, over exposed and under exposed) and usually the over exposed shots taken without a flash, even with high ISO take upto a 1/4 seconds or more! 

Have tried HDR with the kids in the past where they were asked to hold their breath and it came out reasonably well. Tried that earlier today and it was not successful. Then decided to turn the camera around to some more co-operative subjects or catch them at moments when they are in relatively still mode.

Note the detail in the shadows and you will see why High Dynamic Range makes a difference in the photographs. All of the three images below were created using 3 individual images each (-2.0, 0, +2.0 eV exposure bracketing) , no flash, high ISO (800 to 1600) at f4.0 with times changed from 1/125, 1/25, 1/6 seconds to get differnet exposures. They were merged in CS5 using the HDR option and fine adjusted. 

Let me know if this changes your perception of HDR as being overly surrealistic..

So far personally happy with the results. That means, we now have a new Gallery for HDR photos on the site!