New hobby, at least while the weather is nice.
As my 30th birthday is coming up soon, I got a very nice present for it (partially funded by myself as well), a Nikon D5000 digital SLR camera. I’ve only had the camera one day and I’ve already started getting fancy. I’ve started playing around with HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography. Basically what this means is that you take multiple exposures of a particular scene at different brightness levels and combine them into one photo.
A normal photo (as well as printers and monitors) typically use 8 bits of data per colour per pixel. What this means is that you’re limited to 256 shades of each colour per pixel, which in most cases is enough. The problem comes in if you have a lot of dark shadows and/or bright lights in the scene you tend to loose detail due to this. What combining multiple images does, is give you a range of 32 bits of data per colour per pixel which ultimately works out to be 4,294,967,296 shades of each colour per pixel.
This lets you have a lot more brightness levels in your picture to allow you to pick up details that would normally be missed. With LDR images (Low Dynamic Range – 8bits per colour per pixel), often dark greys end up becoming black and light grey’s become white.
As a computer monitor is a Low Dynamic Range device, after creating your 32bit per colour per pixel image, you have to downmap the colours into 8 bit, so some information will be lost. Ultimately though, it doesn’t matter so much as you use a technique called Tone Mapping to keep the details.
So as my first HDR test, I took a night-time photo of Melbourne. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. It may not be the best photo in the world artistically, but I kind of like it.
Melbourne Twilight
