P#3: Getting Both Highlight And Detail Photographing A Stand Of Redwood Trees

Use HDR to capture both light from dark in a stand of redwood trees

Lewis Kemper: The next picture is an HDR example. This is one of my earlier HDR attempts and it was so nice to be able to photograph into trees and know that I was going to be able to get detail in the highlights and detail in the shadows, and not have those dark blotchy images that I'd gotten for years, and years and years.

In the past I wouldn't have photographed under those conditions. I would have walked away from this scene but it's something I've always wanted to be able to photograph. (click the photo for a larger version)

This was in the redwood groves in Jedediah Smith State Park in Northern California.

This is probably the very first time that I was shooting HDR images. It was a learning experience and I had to learn the rules about keeping the aperture constant and changing the shutter speeds when doing the brackets so that the depth of field doesn't change and the size on the sensor doesn't really change, and figuring out how many stops I needed to bracket.

Somebody had given me the advice: take more than you think you need when you're there because you can't go back and do it later. You can always pick which ones you need to use when you come home.

I was bracketing like seven, eight, nine stops in all the pictures I was taking, which was way more than I needed in most circumstances. But I was able to finally take a picture in the deep woods, and have the light come streaming through, and have the detail everywhere and have it look the way I saw it.

When I came home and put these together, I was hooked on HDR, and have been ever since. It was just magical.

In summary

Multiple exposures using HDR technology made this photo of redwood trees possible.