Realistic HDR?

The Life Boat — © Copy­right 2010 by William Beem

This is the Com­mand Mod­ule of Apollo 14, on dis­play at Kennedy Space Cen­ter. It’s a 5-​exposure HDR shot. I’ve men­tioned before that my objec­tive isn’t just to cap­ture the real­ity of a moment, but to try and cap­ture my sense of being in a moment. Some­times that means cre­at­ing a mys­ti­cal feel­ing in the image. Other times, it may mean cre­at­ing an image that makes you think you can just reach out and touch the sub­ject. I tried for the lat­ter on this image, because all I wanted to do while in front of this CM was reach out and feel it. I wanted to know how the tex­ture of the sur­face felt. I wanted to con­nect with this piece of his­tory. I also have absolutely no idea why we have this desire to con­nect through touch, but the urge is very real.

The room at the Sat­urn V/​Apollo cen­ter where this CM rests is quite dark with small spot-​lighting over the dis­plays (you can see the reflec­tion of those lights in the glass cov­er­ing the hatch). Even if I weren’t shoot­ing HDR, I would still need a tri­pod to get a shot like this one. The 0-​EV shot was 1.6 sec­onds and the +2 shot was 6 sec­onds. If you didn’t have a tri­pod, you’d be crank­ing the ISO up pretty high and still wouldn’t get this kind of result. I know it seems awk­ward to go around lug­ging a tri­pod, some­times you do what you have to do.