P#18 Q5: What Makes the Best Subject for an HDR Photo and Where Can You Find It?

What the Camera Can't Capture

Tony Sweet: One of the great things about HDR is that there's really no "best" subject. You can go out at twelve noon in New Mexico when there are black shadows and everything is hot and full of contrast. If you shoot the right series of exposures that allows you to capture all that, it will look exactly like what you're seeing.

That's the whole point. HDR will let you see in a photo exactly what you see in real life because our eyeballs tend to fill things in, bring detail out in shadow, and bring detail out in the sky at the same time. We see all that.

Audri Lanford: But our cameras don't.

Tony Sweet: Not in one exposure it doesn't, but in five or so it will.

Enjoy a Cloudy Day

There's really no best subject. It's just a matter of finding what you want to photograph and what the photographer's sense of ascetic is. In general, it doesn't really matter.

There are some standard things that work well in an HDR photo. An overcast day -- you'll see a lot of images where the clouds look very, very dramatic. You can bring that out in software.

The clouds may have looked like they're almost white, just no detail at all but with only a little bit of detail, you can make it look like a Steven Spielberg movie and can create that drama in Photomatix.

You can bring a lot of that detail up that you don't really see, which is pretty incredible with clouds. You can create this whole new cloudscape.

You'll see a lot of very dramatic clouds in HDR photo websites because that's what they look for. Just a little bit of detail is enough to bring a whole lot more out. It's pretty amazing.

Audri Lanford: Wow. I'm going to try that this weekend. I love shooting clouds. That sounds like a lot of fun.

Tony Sweet: Gray cloudy days with just a little bit of detail in the sky are a great situation.

In Closing

According to Tony Sweet, when it comes to HDR photography there really isn't any single best subject to shoot. It's more about finding what you want to photograph and applying HDR to that. It does seem, however, that clouds do make a great subject for purposes of HDR photo practice.