ESFotoClix Blog

As we saw yesterday, HDR is one tool in our get-the-right-exposure arsenal. Recently I’ve been trying a new approach to make HDR panoramas with some pleasing results. Especially for nighttime photography, HDR allows us to expand the dynamic range of our images and side-step the challenge that bright lights and deep shadows present. Here are two HDR panoramas images of the Long Beach, California skyline.

Panoramas present their own unique and interesting challenges. Seldom will they work along usual composition lines such as the rule of thirds or simplification. The subject is rarely something as straight-forward as a tree or an interesting rock in the foreground, but rather, often turns out to be the entire scene — a huge prairie, a mountain range, or a cityscape — and as such must be unusual and striking enough to hold the viewer’s interest. In addition, the viewer will not be able to take in the entire scene as easily as she would with a standard composition, and when we add HDR, we bring more detail in the shadows and hence more information that the viewer must process.

HDR could also save what would otherwise have been a contrast-less panorama, or one where a bright sky on one side of the composition threatens to undo the image, as is the case in this next example. In the non-HDR version, the drama in the sky was lost, but with HDR it all comes to the forefront. Unlike the previous two examples, this panorama’s smaller size provides more of a standard composition, as we saw in a previous article.

If you want to give HDR panoramas a try, I recommend you do so with a tool that integrates both HDR and panorama capabilities in the same application. An integrated tool will save you a lot of time and effort and make the process one that you are more likely to embrace.

If you have been dreaming about becoming independently wealthy so that you can afford a digital medium format camera, you may want to know you don’t need to keep playing the lottery. Having read Dennis Frates’ article from the August 2009 issue of Outdoor Photographer, I decided to try his technique of generating 4×5 format images by stitching 3 vertical frame panoramas.

At first, I decided that visualizing the right composition in 3 frames instead of just one would require some imagination, so for each scene I tried, I first shot a single 3×2 standard format image. This next sample was taken at 10mm to approximate the wide perspective a 3 frame panorama gives. Incidentally, and not particularly on point, this image also happens to be a 3-stop HDR.

Once I decided the composition worked, I then set up for a 3-frame panorama with vertical frames. For extra credit I could have shot each frame as a 3-stop HDR, but regrettably, I decided against it. Nonetheless, I was able to push the shadows out a bit in the resultant 4×5 composition. Since each frame was shot at 14mm, the final image benefits from reduced distortion while retaining the wide perspective.

A parting note: while the first image is a 10 mega-pixel capture, the stitched 4×5 version clocks in at 16.7 mega-pixels. Not bad for the lowly D80.