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One of the great challenges of photography is capturing a scene that we see well, but the camera doesn’t. Neither film nor digital sensors are capable of recording all of the tones in a scene that has a great range of brightness, such as rock formations against a sunset. Usually you get something of a silhouette, yet you know that you saw detail in both the sky and the ground.

The range of tones in a photograph is its dynamic range. A scene with a large variance in these tones from dark to light will have a high dynamic range, a range that isn’t typically recorded by a camera.

Consider a scene with light striking a cliff directly, but with trees and rocks in the foreground receiving only light from a darkening sky. Such brightness range is especially beyond popular films such as Kodak Kodachrome or Fujichrome Velvia, so typically, the photographer would expose for the bright light and let the rest go.

The result is a richly colored cliff from the late sun, but pitch-black trees and rocks, which could be used as a dark frame to the cliff, but not much more. Such images could be dramatic shots and beautiful interpretations of a scene, but they weren’t particularly accurate in depicting what nature really looked like.

Enter the power of the computer and digital photography. Now we can deal with extreme brightness range and start reconsidering what’s possible with our photography. There are several things you can do to help deal with extreme contrast range, including double-processing RAW and shooting two exposures of the same scene to be combined in Photoshop.

First, let’s look at HDR (high density range) photography. A simplified explanation of this is that you take multiple photographs of a scene at a range of exposures and then bring those exposures into a special computer program that combines the exposures into one image that shows the whole range of the scene’s tonality. I first tried this with the HDR feature in Photoshop, and I was unimpressed. It seemed like a great idea, but the implementation didn’t work that well for the photographs that I tried. It seemed too much like a “work in progress.”

I saw a number of photographers bravely start working this way with HDR photography, and they did get images with a lot of range in tones. But the photos looked a bit flat to me and didn’t have the life I expected in good nature photography.

Some photographers started exploring this technology early on. I liked some of the photos, but others looked too “gee-whizzy” for me—the effect called too much attention to itself.

Then this past winter, George Lepp sent me several new photos. He had mastered the technology. The photos were terrific, and I now saw a range of possibilities. The software George used was called Photomatix from HDRsoft (www.hdrsoft.com). I checked the website and discovered that this software offered exactly the sort of controls in which I was interested, plus it was reasonably priced.

When I installed the program, I went to some photos I took during one of my workshops in Costa Rica. I had bracketed a sunset shot with the possibility of using parts of two exposures in one image. The shot wasn’t too exciting, but when I tried it in Photomatix, I was excited. I suddenly found I had an image with the tonality of the dark rain forest as well as the bright sunset sky. This was impossible! Yet, it happened, and I knew I had a new tool.

Next, I was in the Mojave Desert outside of Las Vegas, in the Lake Mead Recreation Area and the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area. I tried shooting all sorts of scenes by setting my camera to autobracket, with one-stop changes between each shot, using both three- and five-bracket series. I even tried some shots that I never would have attempted before because the contrast range was too great. When I brought these images into the computer and started playing with them in Photomatix, I was thrilled to see amazing things start to happen. Scenes came alive in ways that I had never experienced before.

 

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