HDR Photography

Some of you might be wondering what that little setting on your camera that says HDR does. Well HDR itself means "High Dynamic Range" which is fancy for the ratio of light in your photograph. When taking HDR photos, you don't just take one photo, but three or more photos at different exposures. What makes HDR photos so special is that when you combine those images together, it creates a surreal image thats pleasing to the eye. HDR photos add light to the spots that need more light and darkness to the spots that need more darkness to create a mysterious, yet beautiful picture. What I like about HDR is that it can turn a boring image with no effects, and turn it into a fascinating picture that brings out the natural part of the image and makes it look more real, yet dream-like.

Now even though I gave you a brief explanation on how HDR works, I feel like I should explain it more. So once you find a picture-worthy place and set up your camera, you find the exposure setting. I recommend taking five different photos at different exposures. The first image is at a low exposure
, the next picture you go up one or two notches, the next go higher, and so on and so fourth, until you've taken the right amount of photos that you want. None of the photos should be the same exposure when taking HDR photos. Now if you have an automatic HDR function, it makes it a whole lot easier. Automatic HDR basically does all that manual stuff for you. It takes multiple pictures at different exposures and combines those pictures into one image. Now while this may be very helpful, I have seen that taking manual HDR photos tend to look better than the automatic HDR photos. But that's just my opinion...

The landscape HDR photo that I took myself, looks pretty surreal to me. I really like how it merged together even though I (for some odd reason) only had six photos instead of seven... Though I was really upset I only had thirteen photos instead of fourteen, I feel like I did fairly well. I think my landscape photo was better than my experiment photo, and the surrealism is very nice in both photos. The thought process behind the landscape photos is simple: I wanted it to look like a dream, but not the kind of dream where it's all nice and fairytale-like. It's the kind of dream where it's mysterious, yet beautiful. In my experiment photo, I wanted to pay attention to the detail.

My final picture that I put together in photoshop turned out alright. I could've done a lot more to make it better, such as paying attention to the rule of thirds, or maybe moving Rafael and Leila up a bit so Rafael's head is peeking out of the ocean and Leila is actually looking at the word "confidence". But the final image still turned out okay even though I could've made it better.