The reality of course, is that this is often not an option for us mere mortals. We do not have the flexibility to get up at the wee hours of the morning and trek to a good spot that we scoped out the day before and stay there for several hours getting good shots.  If we did this, our families would kill us.

Therefore much of the light we get to shoot in is of the worst kind.  It occurs when the sun is high above during the mid day.  The other reality is that you may find that the sky is cloudy and ugly on that particular day.  However, this does not necessarily mean that all hope is lost.  There are a number of options available to you and in this post, as well as future ones, I will go over these in more detail.

First, there are some things that you can do to get that ideal morning or late afternoon light without dragging your family out of bed.  This is possible through prior planning.  If you make sure that your hotel is located near some interesting sites, you can wake up early in the morning to photograph them and return to join your family for breakfast.

For instance, on a recent trip to Turkey I made sure to stay in the Sultanahment area – which contains the Blue Mosque and the Haghia Sofia – along with a host of other interesting places.  This enabled me to get out and shoot some photos in the morning.  I would wake up around six in the morning, shoot for a bit, then join my family for breakfast.  It also enabled me to get some shots of these crowded places with fewer people in the shots.  My wife loved this solution as she appreciated sleeping in a bit and when we did get out I didn’t stop every few minutes to take a picture.

However, this does not work well for day trips – when you are seeing locations further from your hotel.  In these cases, you almost always wind up seeing the site during the middle of the day.

You will of course not get dramatic sunrise or sunset lighting during this time, but a blue sky is better than a blown out sky.  There are several options that I make use of during these times.

The easiest option is to simply pay attention to the light.  For example, most of the time if you are facing horrible light, if you turn around you will find the lighting much better.  Always avoid shooting towards the sun.  This sounds very simple, but you would be surprised how many times you’ll find yourself doing it.

There will be times though, when you simply cannot get behind your subject or your prefer the viewpoint that looks almost right into the sun.  In this case, you will have to contend with the wide dynamic range.  Of course, you don’t always have to get all of the dynamic range in there.  I am a sucker for silhouette shots, though many others don’t like them.

Another option is to take an HDR shot.  This is particularly useful inside dark buildings where the outside is very bright.  Of course, you may not like the effect, but in many cases this is the best way to get the closest to the full dynamic range.

Even in this shot, the dynamic range was too much to get the outside behind the door correctly exposed.  However, it did improve the gleaming light on the floors and in the windows above.  As tripods and monopods are often not allowed, I shoot these HDR shots handheld using exposure bracketing.  Unfortunately, Canon is still brain dead in this area and only allows three shots on all but the 1D series cameras.  To compensate for this, I set the bracketing to every two stops and shoot in RAW.

The other option, which also works for cloudy days when even exposed sky will be white, is to add the sky in post processing.  This is quite easy to do, though it takes some time to get it perfect.  The following is a shot taken during a cloudy day.

The following is the same shot with a bit of editing.  It is still a bit raw, but gives the basic idea.

To do this, I took the shot above and another shot with a better sky and did the following.

1) Copied the shot above as a new layer on the one with the sky.

2) Selected the white sky using the magic selector.

3) Deleted the bad sky – replacing it with the better one.

4) Burned the building a bit in order to make it look a bit more natural.

I do not advocate using this as an escape, but there are times when the scene is very interesting and the weather just refuses to cooperate.  A true pro would stay in a location for a good period of time and wait for the right weather, but the rest of us need to deal with what we are given.

This certainly is not an exhaustive list of what is possible, but I hope it has illustrated that it is still possible to get good shots without waking the family at 4 AM every morning and trekking them to the same spots to get the best light.

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Recently she got another listing and I went out to photograph it.  There were two main goals I hoped to fix.

• Fix the reflections on the floor from the windows.
• Improve the view from the windows.

One interesting thing with this house was the absence of light fixtures.  This meant that I needed to depend entirely on ambient light, which worked out very well for HDR.  The other agent co-listing the property tried shooting it with his SLR and mentioned that the shots didn’t come out very well.  The interior of the house was very dark, while the windows were very bright – making it perfect for HDR.

I shot a lot of frames for many of these.  Many of them used eight shots to create the HDR.  In particular I did this to make sure the reflection onto the floor wasn’t overexposed.  I think I succeeded in this respect as the floor is not overexposed here.

The shots are deliberately darkened a bit per request from my wife (who is the realtor).  This makes them look a little less fake from the HDR effect – though in the shot above it’s still a bit obvious from the window.

I decided to try to fix the window, and blended the shot from the window from the image with the best window exposure onto the HDR shot.

I think this is a definite improvement, though there is probably some work still to do here.  In particular, I’m not sure the HDR and non HDR parts of the shot work well with each other, but it is a good start.

I could have taken the outside shots without HDR, but I wanted to keep them consistent.  Interestingly, I did not notice that I had the same reflection issues in the exterior shots as I did with the interior – something I will need to pay closer attention to next time.  As the exterior shots had less apparent dynamic range, I only used about four exposures for each of them.

Overall I believe that I am still improving and I will have ample opportunity to improve more in the near future.

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One thing that I am pleased with in these shots is that I did not blow out the windows as I did before.  In my first attempt I was a bit lazy and just set the camera to bracket the exposures.  This time, I metered the windows and then metered the darkest part of the room, then took a shot each stop in between.  I like the results of this much better.

Of course, there are some things I would like to improve.

In the shot above, I feel the effect of the light on the right is too strong.  On one hand, I like the light there.  However I do not like the strong light on the wall and I need to figure out eventually a good way to get rid of it.

Kitchens are difficult rooms due to all of the reflections. I think I did decently here, though I would prefer to get rid of the reflection on the floor and the sink is a tad overexposed.  I could probably clone out the reflection on the floor, but there are probably better ways.  The next time I think I’ll try turning out the lights for one or two shots when I suspect reflections will be an issue.  I am curious to see what Photomatix does in this case.  Of course, here the reflections were coming from the window so it may not have helped.

One thing I would like to get better at is making the windows ‘pop’ more.  I have read about ways to do this using exposure blending and I think I’ll try it out some time.  With the pure HDR effect, I feel that the windows are a bit dull, though you can see out of them well.

I’m happy though that this is a step in the right direction.  I have several other shoots already planned as Nelya has several more listings coming and a new agent will use me.

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Being not familiar very much with HDR, I used one of her listings that is coming up to try it out.  The listing is a foreclosed property and has promise but needs a lot of work on the inside.

I must say that I am quite impressed with the new version of Photomatix.  It is easier now to create images that aren’t as fake as they used to be.  I also like the RAW file support and the ability to create an HDR shot from a single RAW file, which is fun to play with.  They even added support for the 5D Mark II, so they are definitely on top of things.

I certainly will not claim that these are the perfect HDR shots.  I still have a bit to learn.  Eventually I should read the manual for Photomatix to figure out what all of the settings truly do.  Right now I just mess with a number of them until I get what I like.

I was also a bit lazy in how I did the exposures.  I just picked a medium exposure and then set the camera to bracket 1 1/3 stops each way.  After processing the pictures, this is not the optimum way to do this.

In my next shoot, which I hope will occur next week, I plan to meter the high and low ends of the dynamic range and then take a shot at each stop.  For instance, I’ll first meter the windows, then the dark corners.  This means the number of shots per room will be different but I suspect the results will be better.

The shot above is a prime example.  Obviously none of the shots I took metered the window correctly.  The corner on the left is also a bit dark.  However, I do like the exposure in the room to the right.

In this shoot I also did something rather small.  I placed a hot shoe leveler on the camera to make sure all shots were completely level.  In general I am happy with the verticals in these shots and I think that is one reason why.

I have also read about a technique that involves using a bounced flash set to manual mode with HDR, in order to improve the brightness of the walls and ceilings.  I like this idea, but my rule is to only try one new thing at a time (so if it doesn’t work I’ll know what went wrong) so I’ll try that idea on a future shoot – most likely one of my wife’s so I can reshoot if I don’t like the effect.

Overall I think that I will continue to take HDR shots as I prefer to not have to figure out where to put the lights all of the time.

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First, the good points about the book.  The main positive is that my understanding of HDR was completely wrong.  The vast majority of pictures that we see and call HDR are not HDR at all – they are HDR images converted to LDR images using various types of tone mapping.  A true HDR image still contains all of the original color data and generally is not stored as a .jpg or other standard image format.  This generally means that the entire dynamic range of the picture cannot be displayed on the screen.  Of course new monitors, such as Dell’s new 30″ wide screen monitor are improving in the area of dynamic range and the book mentions some true HDR monitors in prototype.  However, for the vast majority of us, this means that we need to use a slider to go through the dynamic range of the picture.

This also means tremendous differences in how we approach workflow – as a number of the standard Photoshop tools work quite differently on true HDR images.  The author emphasizes that the vast majority of editing should be done in the HDR copy of the image, and only when an LDR copy is requited should the image be converted.

The most useful part of the book involved going through the workflow for several types of shots.  The workflow was started in Photomatix, then resumed in Photoshop CS3.  It was very helpful to see how the true HDR pros go about their workflow and I learned a number of things about Photoshop.

However, there are a number of negatives about the book.  Perhaps the primary reason I will not buy this book for my ‘collection’ is it will be out of date within a very short period of time.  The author goes into detail about the myriad image formats and high end digital camera equipment available today.  However, technology moves very fast and this information will all be out of date within a few months of publishing.  Since this information takes up a large percentage of the book, that means most of it will be out of date.

The other major drawback is, from a photography point of view, I learned very little.  There was no information pertaining to the actual capture of HDR and panoramic pictures that was new to me.  There was quite a bit of information that just did not seem relevant.  For instance, there is quite a bit of information involving taking a panorama picture with a shiny metal ball – in case you want to save money on the optics.  However, as he goes through the workflow it is immediately obvious that this is a very painful way to go – with obvious image quality issues.  This seems to be mainly for the benefit for photographers with Point and Shoot cameras, though in the beginning he stresses that you really need an SLR capable of manual settings.

Another major pain point is the insistence on taking 360 degree and complete sphere panoramic shots.  While this information would be useful for creating IPix fly through images, most photographers do not take completely 360 degree pictures.  Therefore the workflow that most of us require is quite a bit different than that stated here.  He really makes something that can be done easily with a number of tools out there into something overly complex.

The final chapter, about CG and HDR, I skipped completely as I do not practice this nor do I intend to.  For some graphic designers forced to add or remote significant objects to a photo, this will likely be useful information, but for the majority of photographers this is only “by the way” info.

The truth is, of the 344 pages here, only a handful of them were very useful to me.  A lot of the information will be out of date quickly and even more is not useful for most photographers.  I was really excited about this book when I received it, hoping that it would go into detail about how best to take HDR shots in the field, but I ended up disappointed.  From the reviews I read, this is the best HDR book out there.  In that case I suspect most of my learning will be from the HDR experts in the various forums.

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