There are some photographs that never quite look the way I remember them.
I can remember standing somewhere in dramatic light, looking at a landscape that seemed full of colour and contrast. The sky was glowing, the shadows still contained detail, and the whole scene had a sense of depth that was difficult to describe. Then I would return home, open the photograph on my computer and start editing.
Firing up Lightroom, I would adjust the contrast, experiment with colour and try to find a balance that best represented the scene I’d just witnessed.
Sometimes I could get close. But often the photograph still felt slightly wrong.
The sky might have lost some of the vividness I remembered. The foreground could look flat, or the darker parts of the image would become noisy as I tried to recover detail. I could spend hours adjusting the same photograph, but eventually I would reach the same conclusion: the file simply didn’t seem capable of reproducing what I had seen.
When I was learning photography, this was something I encountered regularly. I didn’t understand at first why some photographs were so difficult to process. I had taken what looked like a perfectly good shot, so why couldn’t I make it look the way I remembered?
Eventually I learned about exposure bracketing.
The idea was simple enough. Rather than taking one photograph at a single exposure, I would take several, each at a different level of brightness. The darker exposure would preserve detail in the brightest parts of the scene, while the brighter exposures would record information in the shadows. Back at the computer, I could combine them in Lightroom to create a single image containing a much greater range of information.
The first time I did this successfully, it felt a little like I’d discovered a secret.
I could reduce the highlights and, instead of watching the sky turn into a washed-out patch of white, detail would appear in the clouds. I could raise the shadows and an area that had looked almost completely black would come alive with subtle colours and textures.
It was one of the things that first made me interested in the technical side of landscape photography.
I also took it far too seriously.
For a while I bracketed almost everything. Five photographs of every scene became my standard approach, whether the scene actually needed five exposures or not. A completely flat landscape with very little contrast might get exactly the same treatment as a dramatic sunset.
I didn’t yet understand how to read a histogram properly, or how to recognise when bracketing was really necessary. It seemed safer to have too much information than not enough.
Over time, though, my approach became more refined. I learned to look at the histogram and the highlight warnings on my camera. I became better at judging the contrast in a scene before pressing the shutter. Three exposures were often enough. Eventually I found that I could get the same results with two, or perhaps even a single exposure.
It saved a surprising amount of storage space.
My processing changed too. I became more careful with the adjustments I made to HDR files, particularly when dealing with brightness. I no longer considered bracketing a photographic magic pill that guaranteed good results as long as I’d taken enough exposures. But there was always a limitation that I simply accepted as part of sharing my photography in an increasingly digital world.
No matter how much information I captured, the finished photograph was ultimately going to be displayed within the limits of standard dynamic range.
Our eyes don’t experience a landscape in quite the same way.
Standing beneath a dramatic sky, we can perceive detail in relatively dark areas while also seeing intense brightness in clouds, reflections or sunlight. A photograph displayed on a conventional screen has a much smaller range in which to represent those differences. The photographer therefore has to compress the scene into something that the display can reproduce.
That has been part of the craft of landscape photography for as long as I have been doing it. You capture a scene with a huge range of brightness, then find a way to interpret it within the limitations of the medium.
It becomes almost invisible after a while. You stop thinking about it.
You photograph the scene, process the HDR file, bring the highlights under control, lift the shadows where necessary and create the best interpretation you can. The photograph may contain considerably more information than you can actually display, but that’s simply how things work. It becomes part of the challenge, part of the fun. Accepting those limitations is simply part of being a landscape photographer.
Until recently, anyway.
• • •
Over the last few years, improvements in display technology have made it possible for modern screens to reproduce a much greater range of brightness. At the same time, developments in image formats have made it increasingly possible to preserve and deliver some of that additional information.
HDR, or high dynamic range, is therefore no longer just something that happens during the capture and editing process. It can now be part of the entire journey from camera to viewer.
That changes things for a landscape photographer.
The ability to capture a greater range of brightness has existed for some time. What is different now is that there are increasingly common ways of actually showing that range to someone looking at the photograph.
I’ve been watching these developments from a distance for several years. I didn’t have an HDR-capable display on my computer, and delivering HDR photographs through a website introduces another layer of complexity. There seemed to be quite a few reasons to leave it alone.
But smartphones changed that.
Modern phones can have remarkably capable HDR displays, and I already had an iPhone in my pocket. Recently I decided that it was time to stop watching from a distance and see what I could actually do with my own photographs and this new display technology.
The first photograph I processed specifically for HDR delivery was Moraine Lake in Canada. It wasn’t an obvious candidate. It was a cloudy daytime photograph rather than one of those spectacular scenes with a bright sunset and deep shadows. I just wanted to see what was possible.
As I pushed the highlights higher, the snow-covered slopes became brighter, and the clouds above the peaks became more textured and dramatic. At first, I was excited by how much more room I had to work with. But I quickly pushed it too far. The clouds became unnaturally bright and almost metallic.
I went back and processed it again, this time using the additional range much more subtly. The result was less dramatic, but more convincing. The scene started to feel more faithful.
Another image I’ve enjoyed revisiting is a photograph I took in Calgary.
Flock and Flame looks across downtown Calgary as a dramatic sunset developed above the city, with the colours reflected across the Bow River. It was probably the most spectacular combination of light and colour I encountered during my trip to Canada, but I never felt that my edits did it justice. The contrast didn’t feel quite right, and whenever I tried to push the image further, it started to look artificial.
Processing and outputting that image as HDR has allowed me to achieve a result closer to the experience of standing on that bridge at sunset. It doesn’t fully capture the vibrance and range of contrast of the moment, but it gets significantly closer, and I find that exciting.
The difference isn’t simply that the photograph is brighter. It’s that there is more room to represent the relationship between the bright sky, the darker city and the reflections in the river.
I’ve noticed something similar with photographs of cities at night.
The lights themselves are often part of the subject. When I revisited some of my photographs of Fisherman’s Wharf marina, the dark blue water could remain relatively subdued while the city lights became brighter and more vibrant.
On a conventional display, I had always treated those bright lights as something that needed to be brought under control. On an HDR display, I can allow them to occupy a little more of the range available to the photograph. The lights are part of the story of many of my cityscape photographs, and it’s great to be able to share that with greater fidelity.
• • •
There is, however, a problem with all of this.
I don’t currently have an HDR-capable display on my computer, which makes editing HDR photographs rather more complicated than it would otherwise be. I have been using an iPhone as a way of previewing the results, switching between my computer and the phone to see how the photograph changes.
It isn’t an ideal workflow, but it has been enough to start experimenting.
Getting the photographs onto my website has been another challenge. Producing an HDR image in Lightroom is only one part of the process. The file then needs to make its way through the website and eventually into a browser. The visitor will also need a compatible display to benefit from all that additional information and view the image in HDR.
Each step of the journey needs to be considered carefully if the image is going to reach the viewer in the best possible form. There is a difference between creating an HDR photograph and delivering one.
The photograph can contain all the information you want, but if something along the way converts it to standard dynamic range, optimises it incorrectly or simply doesn’t know what to do with it, the viewer may never see the result you intended.
I’m still learning about this side of things too.
• • •
Perhaps the biggest thing I’ve learned so far, though, has nothing to do with file formats or displays.
It’s restraint.
For years I’ve been accustomed to working within the limitations of standard dynamic range. Bright areas had to be controlled. Shadows had to be lifted carefully. There was a relatively narrow window in which a photograph could look convincing on a conventional screen.
HDR eases some of those restrictions.
That is exciting, but it also creates a new, important consideration.
Just because I can make something brighter doesn’t mean I should.
The first version of my Moraine Lake photograph taught me that. I wanted to find the limits of the technology, so I pushed the clouds until they looked unnatural. It was useful to see what HDR could do, but it also made clear that the most convincing result wasn’t necessarily the one that used the greatest range.
I think this is going to take time to learn.
A poor photograph isn’t going to become a good photograph simply because it is displayed in HDR. HDR can’t fix a weak composition, uninteresting light or a photograph that never worked in the first place. What it can do is give a photograph more opportunity to express the brightness, colour and contrast that made the scene interesting to begin with.
For landscape photography, I find that particularly appealing.
So much of what draws me to a landscape is the quality of the light. A shaft of sunlight across a valley, the glow of a sunset reflected in water, the brightness of clouds above a darker landscape. These are often the things that made me stop, made me look, and drove me to take the photograph in the first place.
For years I’ve been learning how to tell that story within the limitations of a standard display.
Now those limitations are beginning to loosen.
I don’t think that means my photographs should suddenly become brighter or more dramatic. If anything, I suspect it will require even more care. There is a new range available to me, and I’m still learning how much of it belongs in each photograph.
Perhaps that’s what interests me most about HDR.
It isn’t simply a new way of displaying photographs. For me, it is another opportunity to revisit images I’ve lived with for years and ask whether I can now get a little closer to what I remember seeing.
Some of them will benefit from it. Some probably won’t. And I’m looking forward to finding out which is which.
I also now know what I’ll be adding to my birthday wish list: an HDR monitor.