What do you think? Your comments are more than welcome.People certainly are polarized when it comes to HDR. Either they love it or they hate it, and within those camps there are those who disparage anything not realistic and others who are captivated by the surrealistic or more extreme treatments.
In my humble opinion, the HDR concept is a valid approach to rendering an artist's (a photographer or pixel manipulator can be an artist) vision. The current software offerings have made creating HDR images available to the masses. There will be good ones and there will be bad ones and there will be ones you like and others you dislike.
An almost perfect analogue is typography. Everybody and his brother (or sister) who has MS Word has the tools to be a typographer. How few of them have the vision.
Ansel Adams was doing HDR's in 1939. He compressed 7 or 8 zones of light values into the 5 or so that could be reproduced on paper. Are there those who don't appreciate or like his work? Undoubtedly. Do some people think his technique was flawed? Sure. Does anyone doubt for a moment that he saw through an artist's eyes? I don't believe so.
Can one criticize technique? Absolutely. But is it fair to criticize an artist's vision?
HDR is just a medium. An art form. HDR is to digital photography as oil or chalk-and-charcoal is to painting. I for one enjoy seeing the results when a real artist creates an HDR image. And I'm going to keep trying too. One day, maybe, some of my images will match what I see inside my head.
What's it all about?
This blog is about photography and photoediting. Its purpose is to provide hints and tips and links to interesting and useful resources for digital photographers, regardless of their level of expertise or experience. It is aimed at people who use digital SLR cameras and who process their images using the latest versions of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.
The author of this blog is Glenn Springer and you can read more about him at his web portal at faczen.com. Information on workshops, and links to everything is at photography.to. Glenn's original blog, which is an ongoing journal of his photographic meanderings goes back to 2006 and contains many additional hints and tips, as well as representative images that he has made. Gallery quality prints are available through his Smugmug gallery site. It is an interesting place to visit to see a variety of quality images, as well as an ongoing general journal of photos going back several years.
Photography workshops are scheduled every few weeks starting in the Spring. For an overview of what's happening, please visit the photography.to website.
The most recent blog post is below. Scroll down to the bottom to see the list of previous postings or search for any particular topic.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
HDR: is it here to stay?
I think so. In anticipation of an upcoming sequence of articles on HDR techniques, I offer the following thoughts, which I wrote for another blog I read. There were passionate comments from both sides, which evoked the following response from me.
