Very Interactive People

Recently I replaced my point and shoot photo camera with a DSLR camera. I bought a Canon EOS 500D. I always loved making photo’s, but never took the time to really get into it. This will change now I have my 500D

Here are some pictures I took this week in the Ostend harbour area:

These are all multi-exposure HDR images. I used 3 exposures (-2,0,+2) to get these results. I try to keep my HDRi’s as natural as possible. When I started making HDRi’s, I made the same mistake most beginners make, and that’s overprocessing the photo’s to get that dramatic HDR look. For some reason most HDR enthousiast don’t mind their final image looks flat, has halo’s around objects,  etc, as long as it has a “HDR-look”.  In my opinion this is not what HDR is about.
Personally I think a good HDR photo is a photo that doesn’t look like a typical HDR image. So I just use the technique to have perfectly lit photographs, and try to keep away from the dramatic overprocessed look.

I’m an active Flickr.com user, and I’ve noticed lots of HDR images popping up lately. Some of them are absolutely garbage, but every now and then a true jewel pops up. I’ve always wanted to experiment with HDR images, but I don’t own a digital single lens reflex camera. I have a Panasonic Lumix TZ3, which is a great point and shoot camera. Sure, it’s getting a bit outdated, but it’s still a fine piece of equipment. Perfect for travelling pictures, and that’s what I use it for most of the time. Any camera that allows manual over- or under-exposure of a photo can be used to create HDR images, but the TZ3 comes with a handy auto bracketing feature that makes the life of a HDRi enthousiast so much easier.

On my last vacation, I tried a first HDR photo. The result wasn’t great, but it was ok for a first try. You can see that photo here. This first attempted inspired me to try creating some more, and hopefully better ones.
So, recently, me and my girlfriend went to Valencia and Barcelona for a week (between Christmas and New Year). It was the perfect occasion to try some new HDR photo’s.

Taking the source pictures:
I am told, to create good HDRis, your camera will need to be able to do auto bracketing ranging from -2AEB to +2AEB. Unfortunately the TZ3 only supports -1AEB to +1AEB. But, as you can see in the examples below, the results are looking great anyway. When I buy a new camera I will certainly buy one that can handle +-2AEB.
So, before shooting a picture I followed these steps:

• Put my camera on a tripod (in my case that was just a 10 euro flexible tripod)
• Configured my camera to automatically shoot 1 under exposed, 1 normal and 1 over exposed image (auto bracketing):

• Set the self timer to 2 seconds (pressing the button causes the camera to move. After a 2 second delay I’m sure the camera has completely stopped moving)

Unfortunately, I forgot to configure my camera to use a low ISO setting. My camera automatically chose the ISO, and for indoor scenes, it chose a higher ISO. This resulted in a lot of noise. When creating HDR images you should try to avoid noise. Most of my indoor images failed miserably because of this. This is something I need to try next time.

Processing the images:
I used Photomatix Pro to create the HDR and I also used it for tone mapping. Afterwards I did some post-processing in photoshop, but that was merely cropping, adjusting the contrast, exposure, etc. Maybe I will post a tutorial on that later.
You can download 3 of my source images here, so you can try for yourself. The subject is a cannon on top of Mount Juïc, Barcelona (these cannons are placed around the castle of Mount Juïc):

So in Photomatix Pro, you click on the “create HDR image” button, and select the source files.

After clicking “ok”, Photomatix will ask you how the images need to be processed.

If you didn’t use a tripod, you might want to check the “align source images” checkbox. In this case I used a tripod, so that’s not necessary. The object was also very well lit, so there’s little noise. Because of that I also don’t have to check the “reduce noise” checkbox. And finally, because there are no moving objects in the scene (you should avoid moving objects when creating HDRi’s!), I also don’t need Photomatix to try to reduce ghosting artifacts.
Now press “ok” to generate the HDR image. Before tonemapping it, you should check if everything is aligned properly. If not, go back and repeat the same process, but choose “align source images”. If everything is ok, press the “tone mapping” button.
For this tutorial, I tried to create a more or less realistic image. Some people like to over-process their HDRi’s, to get some kind of surrealistic result. Personally I like it somewhere in between. I want the final image to look special, but not overdone.  Click here to see what settings I used to create the image below.

Final result:

On flickr I also have the same picture, but over-processed. It’s very tempting to do this… but the more natural version looks a lot better. Again, that’s just my opinion. If you like the surrealistic look, go for it!  Click here to see the same tonemapped HDR photo, processed with other settings for a more surrealistic/dramatic effect.

And last but not least: here are some of my HDR attempts. I took these photo’s on our trip to Valencia and Barcelona:

You can view the full set here.