HDR photography: Stuff of dreams or Satan’s spawn?

The “look of the film” is determined by choice, not the conventions or limitations of technique or the Photomatix tool and its offerings. What the hyperreal-to-painterly effect does is announce HDR, but maximizing the tonal stretch involved may be kept subtle.

The larger issue overlooked but always present is “What is a photograph supposed to look like if not resembling the main bulk of darkroom-and-chemical, film-to-paper products?” What used to be called “straight photography” has become but one useful phrase in computer-mediated illustration. “HDR” seems to have found a place in line with “photo-illustration” and “photo-surrealism”. I’ve had other ways of organizing this issue in years past, using, for example “Type I Photography” to refer to prints emphasizing “fidelity to the real” in execution, and “Type II Photography” to categorize concepts that start with a conventional, finished exposure, i.e., a straight photograph, as a base for layers of conceptual manipulation. With CGI, of course, on confronts great “fidelity to the real” in appearance belied by equally great indulgence in illustrating the physically impossible.

The story of “how I got that picture” has taken two paths, one leading up to the exposure, the other starting after the exposure at the desktop and taking it somewhere else. HDR involves both the pre- and post-production variables, but most of what I’ve seen so far has abandoned “fidelity to the real” and made itself a part of “Type II” digital imaging, or, in Disney-speak, digital imagineering.

For me, it’s apples and oranges . . . their both juicy fruits . . . both grow on trees, but not the same tree. I can appreciate both for what they are, but when I want an apple, an orange won’t do.

Scott Kelby had a great word about this the other day:

“There’s a secret about those “over the top” HDR images that you don’t hear a lot of non-HDR photographers talk about. While many of these photographers don’t like HDR images at all…

….non-photographers absolutely love them!”
http://www.scottkelby.com/blog/2010/archives/10746

Interestingly enough, I do enjoy the occasional HDR image when its done well, just like a good portrait or landscape. If its cliche, over-edited and over done, I don’t like it, just like a bad portrait or landscape…

enjoyed reading this paulo.

i interviewed trey ratcliff back in 2007 when he’d only been doing HDR photography for 10 months and already he was blowing up. ‘hyper-real’ was the term i came up with to describe it.

one thing he said that stood out was that the human eye is continuously readjusting levels of light it takes in–essentially that it can ‘process’ multiple light levels simultaneously–and that this was closely aligned with the essence of hdr. obviously the postprocessing can push the effects to ‘extreme’ levels, but i like how these images (particularly the cityscapes) give an element of flow or possibly subtext?

overall though, hdr feels like dubstep or something – good in certain moments, but not what i want to experience all the time.

For me, it’s not that I dislike HDR photography. I feel that any image shown in HDR can be better represented in some form of art already made. A lot of the pictures in the gallery remind me of old paintings, Alice in Wonderland-esque shots (the new one), apocalypse movie scenes, etc. On the other hand though, sometimes a not-to-over-the-top HDR photo seems most representative of what you actually see with your eye. Maybe I’m stretching a bit here, but like everyone else, I don’t hate HDR, but I prefer more….dare I say…original photography, digital or otherwise.

What makes HDR images look like HDR images isn’t the dynamic range per se, it is the tone mapping. I’ve posted dozens od HDR images on my site thAt no one knew was HDR because of the choices I made in post-processing.

Trey’s images, and everyone elses, could look very different if they made different choices and used different techniques.

I sometimes use HDR while post-processing to bring out the details and contrast in my photos but I keep it subtle and not too flashy.

Otherwise, I’m not a big fan of all those overdone flashy saturated i’m-on-acid kind of HDR shots people seem to be so fond of. Trey Ratcliff has some nice shots but sometimes it’s so surreal that I sit and ponder if any kind of crappy shot can not turn into a cool flashy HDR.

Oh well… most non-photographers seem to like it very much…

I hate HDR in almost every way. It comes across as phoney, lacking both imagination and feeling.