Lessons
Class Introduction
04:44 2Bracketing
10:31 3How to Set-up Bracketing
02:54 4Tools to Capture HDR Better
02:09 5Scenes for Good HDR
07:49 6Process Images in Lightroom® & Photoshop
10:52 7Hyper HDR Style with Photomatix
11:39 8Post Processing in Lightroom®
07:56Lesson Info
Bracketing
But why do we care about a lot of this stuff? Overall, the reason, if we go back into the technical component about what HDR is, it has a lot to do with how we see stuff inside of a picture and something that we generally call the latitude, or a dynamic range of what we can see. So for example, if I took you out to this one spot, people were pissed when I went there to take this picture 'cause apparently if you look, there's people all the way down there at the bottom and you crawl up here on your butt, all the way up to this one spot to get into this one area for there to be a starburst, and everybody was doing it, everybody was doing it and nobody got it. I got all the way up to the top, the sun hit the thing, it went bing, I shot it, I walked down. Nobody else got it, and I was like, thanks guys. It was pretty good. But if you expose for the sky, you tend to lose a lot of this stuff that's here. If you expose for the inside of the cave, you tend to lose a lot of the stuff that sits ...
inside of the sky. So our eyes have the capability to be able to see all of that stuff. Like I can see the brightest parts of my screen, plus the individual strands on your jacket, plus the contours of the black water bottle that sits on the floor, and I can take all of that in instead of one spot. A camera is limited in terms of how much it can take. They've gotten a lot better, but they are limited to be able to do that. Film was limited to some degree, when we work with that kind of stuff. So put ourselves in a spot where we turned around and we said, all right, well how do we then take advantage of these kinds of limitations? And we've started doing that more now, but back when our eyes could not match the camera, we also had to struggle with feeling and learning how to be able to develop. Like the concept of bracketing for HDR didn't come from wanting to do crayons on paper, it came more from insurance and it came more from our days back in film, a long, long, long, long time ago. So, I'll tell you a story. Imagine if you go to New York, and you're sitting in New York and you're sitting at the top of the Rock, and you're using a film camera. It can't show you anything. And you point your camera to the scene, you set it down, you have 400 speed film inside the camera. What would your exposure be at that one point in time? You'd be like, F, I don't know, 8? At a shutter speed of hmm? And click. That's photography. That was photography then. You're like, I'm gonna give this a shot, maybe, and see what happens. You send it off, you send it to the lab, you wait three days, and it comes back and it look like this. And you're like (groans), right? Because you don't know whether or not you got it right, or you didn't get it right. That was half of the problem that you had with photography and you had to remember what did it look like at that moment in time? What were the settings that you thought at that moment in time? You pulled out a notebook, you wrote it down, you said the first one in this one this was this exposure and there was this huge valley that you had to cross before you got there. But those clouds are never gonna be there again, that moment's never gonna happen again, so if you missed it, you missed it. So cameras would turn around and say alright well, how about if I choose one 25th of a second at F8 for 400 ISO? I dunno, just making that up out of the top of my head. And you're there at the moment and you turn around and go, well, you know what, that's what I think it is, but I'm gonna do something called bracketing, which is insurance. I'm gonna basically set up this little thing in my camera that's gonna turn around and say I'm gonna take the shot that I think it is and then I'm going to use something called exposure compensation to be able to regulate one shot versus another shot. Brighter or darker. The internals of your camera have a little button. Everybody has that button. Whether it's on the back, it's on the side, it's at the top, everybody has that button. Your camera's computer turns around and says, you have this reading, it does this reading at this one point in time. Then you turn around and you go, yeah, man, that's really cool. One 25th, F8, 400 ISO, making it up. But then you turn around and you go, man, I dunno. Could you make that a little darker? I know you technically think that that's what it is, but artistically, I'd like to be able to underexpose something because by underexposing it, I can saturate the colors a little bit, and get a little bit more highlight information. So you hit this little button and you go I want you to underexpose it by one stop. The camera then turns around and goes, all right big shot, this is what you want? Got it. I'll go ahead and I'll underexpose it. Notice that the colors get a little bit more muted, it gets a little bit better. You've shot at one stop of underexposure. So the computer inside the camera is constantly doing this. You can then hit that same button and have it pressed, and go, I want to up one stop. It goes, oh, by going up one stop you want to take the shadow detail and you want to bring all shadow detail up. Okay, I'll do it. It does the calculation, does the calculation, shoots the shot one stop over. Imagine going back to New York and imagine sitting there with your camera and you're like, all right, 125, F8, 400 ISO, click. Now I gotta hit the button, now I gotta move this thing up and I gotta grab this, and I want it to be able to do one stop and then everything's ready, good, click. All right, well the cloud's moving, hurry it up, gotta turn it around, gotta do this one thing and then gotta turn it, and set this and click. That'd be a lot for you to be messing around with. So what bracketing does, is it does automatic exposure compensation. You say I want to take one picture and then I want to take X amount of pictures and you can specify how many of those pictures you want. So in this case, I can say camera, I want you to take this one picture that sits right here. Once I have this picture set, I then want you to take this picture that's one stop underexposed, and once you've finished that, I then want you to go and take another picture and I want you to take that picture as one stop overexposed. The camera goes okay, got it, I can do it. You hit the button, it goes bang, bang, bang or click, click, click, no bangs, that's cool and it takes all three shots and you're done. More often than not, when I'm shooting, when I'm going out and I'm shooting, if I'm doing any kind of landscape work, if I'm doing any kind of work whatsoever actually with my camera, I'm almost always shooting a bracket. Not because I want to be able to do it from an HDR standpoint but because it's holdover from the way that I would do stuff on the film side of things. It's insurance, and since the pictures are free, they're pixels, a lot of the times I'm like I don't care, I'll just shoot three shots if I'm there already. Why not do it? More often than not, I have a general rule for bracketing because what happens is, well before we actually go anywhere else. How's everybody with this so far? Concept's pretty straight forward? We have... so the chat's okay? So the concept is straightforward. Basically what you're saying is, I'm gonna take a picture and I'm gonna take a darker one, and I'm gonna take a brighter one. Or I'm gonna take a certain amount of darker ones, and a certain amount of brighter ones. How many? Depending on the scenario. You can set some cameras where they could do nine exposures with one click. You could have nine shots. You can do some cameras that do three, and only three. As a general rule for me, the amount of bracketing that I usually do for a picture largely correlates to how close I live to the place. If the place is across the street, I'll try three 'cause I could always go back tomorrow. If the place happens to be Jade Mountain, in the middle of Saint Lucia, where you have to spend $3000 a night, I'm gonna shoot the snot out of it. I'm gonna go into the menu and be like, click, click, click, how many can you give me, 16? (imitates multiple camera clicks) People are like, that's cheating and I'm like, depends on the game you're playing. I'm not here to be able to be able to play your game. People are like, oh well, you know, can't you get it right in one shot? And I'm like, if you can, good for you, good job. I don't care. Those are not my rules, that is not my game. It's like you walk into it, it's like playing a basketball game, somebody comes in, turns around and goes, well you know what? Stick one hand in your pocket, put one leg up, turn around and try to dribble on the thing with your elbow and try to see if you can make a shot. Like all these rules for us to work on the things that we want to be able to work on. You know why people back then didn't shoot with automatic cameras, automatic bracketing? 'Cause they didn't have it. Not because you have to go through some sort of rite of passage of manual, in order for you to be able to learn how to do this stuff. If Ansel Adams had bracketing and could shoot on 64 gig cards, he would have been out there, what's up people? (imitates multiple camera clicks) Cause he was trying to get the image out of his head. That's the important part.
Ratings and Reviews
Liz Farrell
It truly doesn't matter if this instructor creates work that looks different from what I like to make. What I got from this course were skills I needed to try something new. (In my case, I watched this before doing some interior photography, knowing I would need to use HDR in Lightroom.) RC teaches you how to set the camera up for bracketing and how HDR software works (in Lightroom, Photoshop, etc.) Apply your own creative aesthetic once you nail down these basics and you'll thank him, too.
Wayne
Just what I was looking for. Basics of what HDR is and the basic steps to do it. I do not care yet about making it realistic or not. I can get into advanced features later, but I am strongly leaning towards non-natural, more impressionistic, looks.