Mark Hobson posted an excellent HDR photograph of which it is hard to see it is HDR. What a great thing! In contrast to the usual use of HDR, this is genius. (HERE is the photograph. Sorry for forgetting the link!)
One often sees HDR images which are unbelievably unnatural. And one thing that often is missing from HDR photographs is real honest deep black - it provides the ground for the colors.
I wonder will we get a new source of photograph "badness" when automatic HDR functionality starts to commonly appear in cameras. I shudder when thinking about this.
Of course, we, probably will get used to such gimmicks, similar to auto exposure, autofocus, zoom lenses, selectable ISO, etc. etc.
And this leads me to a suggestion to the camera manufacturers: might we have cameras which have less dynamical range than we currently do, and might this be a good thing for photographers?
Nowadays, I try to get some black in my photographs, because I feel that it makes the photographs more realistic, more actual and immediate. Sometimes this requires underexposure by two stops or even more.
Here are two examples. The first is of course one where one doesn't need HDR in any case. And one can think of trying to make an HDR photograph of the scene the second photograph - but would it be any good?
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2 comments:
You are so right. I remember when digital post processing first became available for the masses a number of years ago. The equivalent of HDR then was making unnatural and surreal images by cutting, pasting and goodness knows what else. Don't worry, they'll all get over the fad and in the meantime you just keep exploring what you do so very well. I've been blending exposures for a long time now, it's great as I no longer need to carry a whole host of cumbersome graduated filter kit around and creatively it is far more flexible.
Indeed, when using with care, HDR and blending exposures can be good - but then there is the fad, as is with (over)sharpening and (over)saturation and (over)bokeh and almost everything.
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