P#3 Q#5: Using HDR When There Are Extreme Contrasts Of Light

Let HDR software balance light and dark

Lewis Kemper: Extreme contrasts used to be a major problem, especially with film and slide film, but the advent of HDR has recently solved it.

Film had such a narrow range of contrasts. The dynamic range was very short.

Now with the digital cameras and new software doing HDR, high dynamic range imagery, that's not an issue anymore.

When I come across contrasting lighting situations, I shoot a series of bracketed exposures capturing detail in the highlights all the way through until I get detail in the shadow areas. Then I use HDR software to put those images together to capture the full tonal range of what I can see.

I've been taking pictures for almost 40 years and only in the last two years could I actually photograph everything that I saw in front of me. It's opened up a whole new world of photography.

Shooting the HDR imagery has been the best thing to come out of this whole digital revolution.

Audri Lanford: What HDR software do you use?

Lewis Kemper: Mostly I use Photomatix Pro Software.

I find it has many more controls than what's available in Photoshop. I did start out in the beginning doing all my HDR in Photoshop until I leaned about Photomatix software.

I find Photomatix is a little easier and gives me more options and more control. Just yesterday in Yosemite, I was shooting and it was early in the morning. It was fairly even light, but we were shooting the running water with dogwood trees in the background.

Because the water was so dark where the whites were and the foam was coming over, it was washing out because even though the sun wasn't hitting it yet, there was such a difference in the contrast range.

We were able to bracket those exposures and then put it all together with HDR.

I've arranged with the company, HDR Software, to give people a 15% discount. There's a coupon code on my website.

Audri Lanford: Your discount code -- which saves people 15% -- is in the Show Notes of this interview.

How do recommend dealing with the problem of shooting in lowlight conditions when you want as much of the fore, mid, and background in focus as possible?

Lewis Kemper: I think that digital cameras have made a big leap as far as quality goes with longer exposures and noise not being so much an issue any longer.

But, again, if I'm worried about the noise issue part and getting my exposure too long, I'll take two or three exposures foreground, middle ground and background. Then composite those with layer masks in Photoshop or another software that I know some other photographers swear by that's called Helicon Focus, which will take those different focus exposures, and combine them in one sharp image.

I know a lot of people who use it for flowers. I haven't had the time to play with Helicon Focus much.

For the bigger landscape, I find most of the time I do it with layer masks in Photoshop and I use three pictures.

But I know people who are doing macro things are doing 15 or 20 different focus points through a scene and putting that together in one sharp image with the software and getting excellent results.

Audri Lanford: Yes. Actually, in last week's interview with Tony Sweet he mentioned Helicon Focus software because he loves it for flowers.

Lewis Kemper: Right, it's just so amazing, such an exciting time to be a photographer.

To summarize

Remember, using HDR software like Photomatix can make a huge difference in your nature photography -- HDR solves the problem of capturing images where there is high contrast lighting that you simply couldn't photograph the way you wanted before.

And for doing the same thing with depth of field, you can try Helicon Focus. So experiment with the new HDR and depth of field software.