Setting

Nice HDR Ste

Nice one. I Like the rays from the sun and colours in the sky are brilliant.

Steve

Lovely HDR!

xx

That is simply stunning! the sun is amazing!

That is great, love the sun's rays.The sky is wonderful too.

I like this image - the only thing that strikes me as very unnatural is the brightly lit back wall - it looks so unnatural because it really should be in shadow from the low sun. Nevertheless it is a nice image overall.

You've hit on a great point there Jack and it's something that always crosses my mind when it comes to HDR images.

You're right when you say it's 'unnatural' because quite rightly the wall should be in shadow.

If the human eye was to stare at the wall it would adjust to see the wall in detail but if we looked at the bright centre of the shot our eyes would adjust and the wall would be back in shadow again.

Here's my point - As you know - HDR tries to take every part of a photograph and expose it individually then join all the bits together to create a single perfect exposure.

Our eyes don't work like this if they focus on a single point. They will adjust (albeit slowly) to each part of a scene if we move our eyes around it but when looking at a static HDR shot our brains know it's wrong.

That's why I've never been a big fan of HDR shots that try to correctly expose every area of a shot.

I'm sure the whole HDR thing is for another thread perhaps HDR



As for the shot - I think it works well although as Jack says the back of the wall seems a tad bright.

OK so I;m a newbie here. My first reaction/utterance was "holy crap!", in a ositive sense. Then my second reaciton was, this image has been extensively photoshopped right?

What is HDR?

Its a stunning image and I would really like to learn more about how it was generated. please.

I think that this image appears "unnatural" to you as you are judging it based on your experience of photography. I mean that because you have an idea how an image that is shot into the sun should look then this appears to look "wrong"

You are judging it based on that, not on how the image would look if you were stood where I was, because I know that when I took this picture the wall was not in heavy shadow. The eye is capable of handling a far greater range of light than a digital sensor, and therefore in order to produce an image that more closely matches what the eye sees, HDR is used.

Show this image to someone who knows very little about photo's and they will not see something unnatural, as they are not judging it based on how they expect a photo of the same scene to look but on how it would look to the naked eye.

Gav, this image was 9 exposures, 1 correctly exposed 4 under exposed and 4 over exposed 1 "stop" separating the shots. They are then combined in a program called Photomatix, it uses the part of each image that is exposed correctly for each section of the image leaving a "perfectly" exposed image. As I said above, a digital sensor isn't capable of capturing the full range of the scene as there is a wide variation in the lighting of the scene. The HDR gives an image that mirrors what the scene looked in "real" life.