HDR Photo from Des Moines

HDR or High Dynamic Range photography will be crazy big in the next year.

Photographs have long lagged behind the human eye in recording a scene. When you stand on my deck and look at the sky, your eye adjusts for the brightness of the sky and you see the wonderful blue. When you look at the buildings, your eyes adjust to let in more light and you see the wonderful details of the bricks.

When you take a photograph, if the image is exposed for the buildings, the sky will end up too bright. If you set it to get the sky right then the buildings will be way too dark. The trick is to take DIFFERENT pictures, exposing once for the sky and once for the buildings and then combine them. This picture is a compilation of five images put together using the best exposed parts of each photograph. The merged image is a photo that hits the right exposure for every part of the scene.