Anthony's Blog

I've been playing with creating High Dynamic Range photographs with Photomatix.



The idea is that a normal photograph doesn't capture the range of light and darkness in many scenes. In many (most) scenes, something is too light or too dark to be displayed on the screen or on a print. So you take a series of photographs of the same scene with a range of exposures (from over exposed to underexposed) and then produce a single composite version of the scene that displays detail at all levels from light through dark.

In this case, I've played around with the settings to produce somewhat surreal versions of the scene we saw as we walked from Port Melbourne to St Kilda last Sunday. In reality it was a lovely warm day, but these images make it look a little cold and eery. A more subtly processed set of High Dynamic Range photos can look much more realistic than this. I'll have to come back and look at these photos again in a year or two's time to decide whether I've overdone the effect, or if I still think they make an interesting variation on more standard looking photos.

Both of these photos were taken near St Kilda Pier. If you look closely at the top photo, you'll see that the people on the pier look like ghosts. That's because they moved between each of the five photos that were combined to make this single picture, so they are faint shadows.