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Jun 24 2010

Using HDR to Tell a Story

Despite being under the weather on Wednesday, I managed to get a little photography into my day.  I needed to get an image of an abandoned home for a story on another site.  Sadly, there are far too many examples around these days and I didn’t even have to leave my own neighborhood to find one.

A shot like this isn’t about art or the photographer’s creativity.  It’s about providing information to tell a story and supplement the narrative. As I previously wrote, some news organizations currently forbid HDR as an unethical form of photo manipulation.  However, there are news agencies that are re-examining that policy.  I decided to make my own test to support the story. I made a 5-exposure HDR image.

This is the correct-exposure image, with only minor levels adjustments:

Photo of abandoned house

Normal Exposure - © Copyright 2010 by William Beem

Nothing exciting, but you can see that the yard is overgrown and being reclaimed by weeds.  There’s a lot of dappled light from surrounding oak trees, too.  Now for the HDR image:

HDR photo of abandoned house

HDR Image - © Copyright 2010 by William Beem

The HDR image opens up the shadows.  In the previous image, the growing hedges and vines against the house were hidden in the shadows, but are clearly revealed in the HDR image.  Along the left-side of the house, you get a glimpse that the problem growth is much worse in the back yard.  Again, that view is almost completely obscured in the single-exposure shot above.  The light on the house in the HDR image is much closer to how my eye interpreted the scene than the dark shadows of the single-exposure image.  To me, it looks more like reality.  You could argue that the sky is a bit darker in the HDR image. I could argue that the clouds weren’t blown out in reality.  Either image could support my contention that no photograph is truly real.

Another thing to note is that this HDR image doesn’t have the “HDR look” that so many people use for artistic images.  I created this in Photomatix Pro and finished in Photoshop.  I didn’t need to blend it with any of the original images.  Simply reducing the strength of the HDR processing eliminated the halo effect above the treeline.

Try as I might, I just can’t conjure up the word “unethical” when I look at the HDR version of this image.  It does a better job of telling the story.

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Posted in Florida, Orlando, Photography

  • http://jronaldlee.com James

    This is a great example. I might find the saturation on the HDR set a little bit high for my tastes, but you can clearly see the improvement in the story you’re telling here. Nice.

    • http://www.williambeem.com William

      I tend to agree with you about the saturation. It’s one of the things I’m still learning to overcome in HDR. What I should have done with that image is mask in one of the single-exposure shots in places where the HDR process really brought out too much color. That’s what I did to the trees in a later post about returning to visit Disney World again. The trees by the AT-AT were just way too green, so I masked in the more natural color from a single-exposure to tone it down.