The Author – Bart Busschots
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Apr
10
HDR at Night
Filed Under Photography on April 10, 2008 at 2:05 am
Continuing my experimentation with HDR photography I had a go shooting night-scenes in HDR. Since buildings at night tend to have a very high dynamic range I figured I should get better results with HDR than without. I certainly wasn’t wrong. What you do have to bear in mind is that exposures will be long and you’ll need a lot of them. I actually pushed the camera as far as it would go in both directions of exposure compensation to get some of these shots. The sample below is composed of 7 exposures, the longest being 10 seconds, but for a few of the shots some component exposures went as high as 30 seconds.
What I do really need to learn though is to check that my tripod is level before shooting! What should have been my favourite image from the night was spoiled a little by a sloping horizon. I’ve included it below regardless because it still shows the potential pretty well.
You can see all my shots from Tuesday night in my gallery (not all are HDRs but all HDRs are tagged and labelled as such).
[tags]HDR photography, nigth-time photography[/tags]
You know, there’s a function in Aperture which allows you to rotate pictures and thereby levels out the horizon for you 😉 Maybe even iPhoto has that!
I really oughta do another voice mail for nosillacast, if I only had the time to catch up with the missed episodes and record another comment before the new episode comes out!
Hi Hannes,
iPhoto does indeed have such a function but it take off a lot of sharpness from the image so I don’t use it. I prefer a slanting but sharp image to a level but blurred one 🙂
Bart.
Photoshop should level it too, though I’m not sure how it does it. I’ve leveled many a picture in Aperture, and never had a problem with sharpness afterwards. Does iPhoto distort the picture when it levels it?
iPhoto doesn’t distort the image, the way it does the leveling is actually very nice and the interface is very good. The only issue is that it looses some sharpness. This isn’t much of a problem on landscapes and the like but it’s really noticeable on buildings with stone or brick work on them.
Cool pic Bart