Photos: Vivid photos via HDR technique

The darkroom may be a fading element of the rapidly vanishing world of film photography, but all of you out there with digital cameras do have options for manipulating and enhancing your pictures. One of those is known as high dynamic range, or HDR, photography. This technique can help make up\r\nfor a digital sensor’s lack of sensitivity to scenes with a wide range of brightness values.\r\n

\r\nOne practitioner of HDR photography is Sean McHugh, who has an online gallery of photos from his time pursuing a Ph.D. at Cambridge University in England. The image here shows Cambridge’s King’s College at sunset. McHugh’s camera of choice is the Canon EOS 50D digital SLR.

In a nutshell, the HDR technique involves taking not one but several pictures of a given scene, overexposing some and underexposing others. The next step is to use specialized software, such as Photoshop CS2, to take all that data and construct a new image with a wider dynamic range.

This HDR image of Old Saint Paul’s church in New Zealand, taken by photographer Dean S. Pemberton (and also posted to the Wikimedia Commons), was constructed from…

…six exposures using a Canon 350D. Exposure times from top left are 1/40th of a second, 1/10th of a second, half a second, 1 second, 6 seconds and 25 seconds.