russelray Loc: La Mesa CA

When Borders went out of business last year, the first thing I did was take advantage of my employee discount to get some books that I didn't need right then but that I thought I would find interesting sometime in the future.

One of those books was "Practical HDR," by David Nightingale (ISBN 978-0-240-82122-1).

I have rarely liked any of the HDR pictures I've seen. They just seem way overdone for me. Of course, they are art, so I let the artist have his day in the sun.

Photoshop CS6 as a rudimentary HDR that I don't think does much at all, and the just released Paintshop Pro X5 has HDR. Since I just upgraded to PSP X5 and saw the feature on its HDR, I thought I would get out the "Practical HDR" book and do some light reading.

On page 7 in the Introduction, is the following. I have not fact checked it.

"...the earliest photographers looked for different ways to record high contrast, or "high dynamic range" images. In the 1850s, Gustave Le Gray produced a number of dramatic seascapes constructed from two negatives — one exposed for the sea, the other for the sky. He cut both negatives along the horizon, then used the two parts to create a single photographic print. In this way he was able to capture all of the detail in the scene, which would have been impossible with a single exposure. Motivated by the same problem, Charles Wyckoff developed a wide dynamic range film composed of three layers, each of which had a different sensitivity to light. He used this to produce photographs of nuclear explosions, which first appeared on the cover of Life magaine in the 1940s."

I'm sure just about all of us have heard the fairly recent news that even the venerable Ansel Adams practiced creating great pictures with dodging and burning, and the like. His pictures didn't just come out of the camera like that!

So why not recognize that, as my wise old grandmother said, "What comes out of the camera is just the basics to start with," and use everything at our disposal to create the best pictures possible?

Acountry330 Loc: Dothan,Ala USA

I agree with you. But I feel you have raised a Hornets nets.

birdpix Loc: South East Pennsylvania

We have to deal with the fact that even with today's sophisticated equipment our eyes can see a greater dynamic range than our camera sensor can record. As sensors get better and better, HDR processing may no longer be needed but, until that occurs, we are left with finding ways to make our picture look like what we saw, or maybe not!

By the way, it is not recent news that Ansel Adams dodged and burned his photographs. I have a series of books that he wrote and were copyrighted starting in 1952 that describes his process in detail. Whenever he took a picture, he had an end result in mind, his "Visualization", and his exposure of the negative, the negative's processing and the printing of that negative were all carefully adjusted and controlled to achieve his desired result. And that included dodging and burning to make the print the best that he could achieve. He even had a set of symbols that he used to mark up a test print so that his assistants could duplicate his work as needed.

gmcase Loc: Galt's Gulch

Is have seen hdrs that have way too much dynamic range. The human eye can detect unnatural dynamic range as well as overly cooked post processing.

RocketScientist Loc: Littleton, Colorado

This is also the earliest instance of "Cut & Paste"

A few years later we have the alleged first use of a ; and a ) to create an emoticon in a Lincoln speech:
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/19/hfo-emoticon/

Them folks were ahead of their time. :)

Mudshark Loc: Illinois

Every human endeavor is issued a pair of sturdy rubber boots. These are used to wade through the B.S. Photography demands hip waders.

Mudbuggus Loc: Acadiana

There is a reason film for digital cameras is so cheap, the intent is to shoot until you get it 'right'

pp

Jer Loc: Mesa, Arizona

I've seen special effect pre-digital age photos and they are amazing. Probably took weeks to do one photo but it seems in the negative era they could do just about everything or everything Photoshop does. They developed the unsharpen mask using only negatives.

RocketScientist Loc: Littleton, Colorado

Hey! I resemble that remark...

rebride

My wife bought me home some waist high from Alaska, but I don't think it had anything to do with photography.
Actually maybe it did.

wlgoode Loc: Globe, AZ

I could have used them several years ago when I was shooting the skyline of New Orleans from across the river south of the city. Endeavoring to get the framing right with the river in the foreground I stepped further onto to the sand bordering the river. Soon I found myself sinking in quicksand.