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My very first HDR (High Dynamic Range)

This photo which I have converted into a HDR was not taken with the intention to make an HDR, the story behind it falls down like this….

For quiet some time I have been seeing HDR photos in my contacts Photo stream and was always amused to see the amount of color and light they have played with. Sh@mpoo has also been practicing this for some time now and all these days I didn’t know what it was or how it was done (Oh blame me!! Didn’t even try to google).

Today in Sh@mpoos stream I saw some wonderful HDR photos which he took in the T-jetty yesterday evening, I was also there to breath in the evening fresh air yesterday, while this gang were busy clicking pictures. So today when I saw him online in MSN, out of mere curiosity I asked him the most stupidest question a photographer of his caliber would ever hear “how did you bring this effect in your camera”?. I was thinking that it was something that was done by using high tech camera.

He told me that, nothing like that – it is something that you do out of your camera box and it’s more like a talent. I got some basic tips from him regarding it and then later today I did a google and got the software’s and cracked it out.

Yesterday while driving near the IGMH parking zone area, I saw that the sea was very rough and boats were dancing as if it would topple any moment, so went home and took my camera to capture some of those funs. After that I took some snaps of the pigeons near that area and luckly I had three Photos of the same scene which I used to generate this HDR (an since I dont have a tripod, the pictures are not aligned properly if you observe). But the three of them are of the same exposure so had to take it back to Photoshop to do some more additional work and yes Sh@mpoo told me that to make an HDR you can use any camera but all you need is the different exposure, the software and some talents to play with the pictures.

Here is some information about HDR:
In computer graphics and photography, high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of exposures (the range of values between light and dark areas) than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention of HDRI is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to shadows.
Reference: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_imaging

Basically for HDR you need three pictures of different exposures and you mix the three pictures to get one common picture and play around with the slide bars of different styles. You can find the best HDR software’s in this link and I used Photomatix Pro (cracked).
wiki.panotools.org/HDR_Software_overview