ProjectVISUAL

Following on from the article 7 reasons to take up photography, I’ve begun to experiment with what exactly my Finepix S9600 can do. I’m always amazed by those HDR (High Dynamic Range) images created from the blending of differently exposed pictures so I decided to try one myself. In the world of digital photography HDR typically refers to the combination and tone mapping of differently exposed images of the same scene. The scene I decided to shoot was a walkway on my college campus grounds – it was the easiest choice for me since I live there and there are plenty of features to make the shot an interesting one. So one morning at 6am I got up and headed out with my camera and tripod. It was still dark which was great since I wanted to capture the illumination of the streetlights in the picture. My first task was to take three photos each at a different exposure setting. While auto bracketing of ± 1EV is possible I wasn’t aware of this at the time so instead I simply left the apeture constant at F/4.5 and then set the shutter speed to 10s, 15s and 30s. In each case the ISO level was set at the minimum setting of 80 to reduce the amount of noise by as much as possible. The following three images are the single exposure images used to create the final exposure blended image:

As you can see from each image above, no one image gives a really great result; regions are either under- or overexposed depending on the camera settings used. There are plenty of ways I’m sure of blending these pictures together using either photoshop or GIMP but I’ve opted for Photomatix as the process is largely automatic and I’m more interested in good results rather than how to actually achieve the results. Photomatix will ask you for a number of images on your computer and then with a bit of photographic magic will automagically blend them together. The final task then is tone mapping, whereby one set of colours is mapped to another to produce the final picture below;

The result is pretty dramatic, and the contrasting range in colour is much more pronounced than in the original three shots. Most of the ‘improvements’ in image quality is achieved using tone mapping and I’ll definitely be looking more into exactly how the technique works. I havn’t gone into any detail as to what settings I used etc so I’ll be posting a tutorial in the next few days I hope. Watch out for new pictures in the future!

(I’ve only uploaded low resolution images at 530×398 pixels for bandwidth reasons but I can upload higher resolutions if anyone is interested…)