Experiments in Light

I snapped this today in a local shopping centre in Hiroshima, where I’d gone to see a film in the cinema. On the way out I couldn’t help notice the appealing lines of the ceiling in this mammoth building, and luckily I had the D7000 handy to try some shots.

A while back I’d bought Photomatix Pro, software for producing HDR (High Dynamic Range) photos, and I was keen to try it out.

For those readers who aren’t familiar with HDR, it is an attempt to make up for the deficiencies of what the camera’s sensor can deal with by combining a series of images taken at different exposures. The human eye doesn’t have a problem with scenes containing great differences between light and dark, but cameras have always struggled: when confronted with a dark foreground and a light sky, you normally have to set the exposure for one or the other, or compromise between the two, leading to less than optimum results.

I set the camera to burst mode and bracketed so that each shot resulted in a series of three images produced at different exposures. Then, back home, I dropped the pictures into the software and experimented with the various methods of blending them together. Some are more gentle and realistic, but I opted for a fairly extreme setting, giving the picture an artistic, but unreal quality.

HDR is fairly divisive : people seem to either love it or hate it, but it certainly adds a extra layer of creative possibilities to photography.

A larger version of this picture can viewed here at my dedicated website and store, Andy Lightfoot Photography.

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