I think I’m getting the hang of the HDR technique.

After the indoor and hand-held tests documented in this journal over the past few days I ventured forth to the hinterlands with 5D loaded with Optimism, rated at 400 ISO. I have always found that to be a particularly effective film stock.

As before, I set the Canon to record three exposure bursts, with the second and third 2 stops over and under exposed compared to the first. A legacy of the street shooting school, I do not much care for tripods, but those great Manfrotto QR plates made everything go very smoothly, I must say.

I’m trying to learn how to maximize reproduced contrast range without stepping over the line to garish. Easily done with this technique.

So now I know the camera is stationary, but what I did not realize is that any movement in the subject is a matter for concern. As you are combining three or more images, things that move do not look so good. Witness the many translucent gulls shown in my pictures at the beach. Someone once asked Hitchcock how he managed to get all those birds to stand still in his movie to which he cryptically replied “I paid then well”. Seems like I have to get those birds on the payroll.

On the way to the beach I did come across this charming pastoral scene off Highway 46, near our home. The farmer had left the gate open so I shot in, Linhof tripod in one hand, the 5D in the other, and proceeded to bang away, hot footing it before the local pit bull made lunch of my backside. Let me assure you that a good QR head beats a pit bull any time.

Anyway, the clear appeal of this scene was the golden color of the freshly harvested land, contrasting with the trees, sky and that standby for us farmers, the John Deere tractor. God, America, apple pie and John Deere, because America and apple pie would be in short supply sans John Deere. As a wine grape grower I can attest to the discovery that a couple of hours on a Deere beats $250 to the local shrink any time. Lots more fun too. And the engine is made in Japan, so it starts first thing, too!

Taken at noon (bad time for landscape work) the contrast range was, predictably, extreme.

Making Hay. Canon EOS 5D, 24-105mm at 100mm. RAW converted to JPG in Aperture. HDR processed in Photomatix

The next step was to fire up the HP DesignJet 90 printer for the acid test. How sharp is this combined, processed picture when printed to a decent size? On a side note one of the unheralded features of the DJ 90 is the way it keeps the print heads warm even when nominally switched off. I assume this is to prevent ink clogging and, indeed, after some six weeks of non-use (like you, I spend 40% of my year working for the IRS) the first print out is perfect, with no need to run magical routines to clear the heads. The moral of the tale being that if you want to keep your DJ heads ready to go, by all means switch the printer off (the fan noise gets tiresome anyway) but do not pull the power plug.

The result is great. Definition equal to a traditional one negative print and dynamic range to blow your head off. All at 400 ISO.

Bertie the Border terrier testifies to the size of the print:

Bertie guards Making Hay.

After all this banging away on the tripod, I couldn’t resist just one opportunity to take a real, live action shot, so apropos nothing, here it is:

What’s a guy got to do to get a drink around here? 5D, 24-105mm. 400ISO

If someone tells you you should only print the full frame of your negative or digital original – run – don’t walk, away.

You hear this sort of thing a lot from academics and pseudo-intellectuals. The Alfred Rosenbergs of the photography world. Sadly, unlike Rosenberg, they remain alive to propound their mealy mouthed tripe in an earnest attempt to earn what modest living their lack of intellect affords them. It goes something like this:

“No great photographic artist every crops his originals when printing, knowing that true greatness in a photograph can only be attained when the original visualization is rendered truly and uncompromisingly on photographic paper. To crop is to destroy the integrity of the creative process.”

Often this codswallop will be followed by a reference to Cartier-Bresson whose prints are so intellectually honest that they often include the surrounding frame of unexposed film. What art. What genius.

What utter rubbish.

Given that the sole purpose of an art photograph, as opposed to a commercial one, is to provide aesthetic satisfaction for the viewer, it is irrelevant whether the spectator sees all of the frame or just a slice. The only thing that matters is that the photograph works.

Here’s a snap I took in one of the great public squares of Paris. Yes, you can check the dimensions – all of the original 24mm x 36mm of the negative is faithfully preserved.

Crossings. Paris 1977. Leica M3, 35mm Summaron. TriX/D76

Three crops follow.

In the third crop I also removed three people in Photoshop. Just didn’t like the way it looked.

Now pretend that you never saw the full frame original. Who is to say that any of the crops is better or worse? The reality, of course, is that the photographer should crop for effect and choose the best possible crop to display his art work.

The academic rule is even dumber when you think that the same effect can be largely accomplished by simply placing a longer lens on the camera. I print it full frame using a 90mm lens on the camera versus cropping from the original taken with a 50mm lens. No difference, maybe except for definition and grain. But the first picture is sacred as it is uncropped, whereas the latter is garbage as I broke a cardinal rule of academia. Doesn’t work, does it?

What with all that burning, dodging and special chemistry he used, you wonder how Ansel Adams ever got past these academics. They probably mistook darkroom technique for great photography. In one respect you can think of Adams as the Greatest Cropper of all. How different is cropping, after all, from selective exposure in the darkroom? Both have as their intent the removal of unwanted features or effects. So, for that mattter, why not remove things, as I did in the third crop above, to make the result better?

All of which goes to confirm that Those Who Can – Crop, whereas Those Who Cannot – Teach.

Crop away. Keep cropping until it looks good or move onto the next original. And if you really want to fool them, why not add a frame depicting the unexposed film, with film manufacturer of choice, in Photoshop. How intellectually dishonest of you.

You will be in good company. The great photographer Brassai thought nothing of using one original to craft two or three pictures.

It looks like a steady tripod is essential to do things right.

As regards image quality my invariable goal is to secure a level that permits the making of Really Large Prints so with this goal in mind I took the Canon 5D to the local Main Street yesterday, seeing as it was Independence Day, to experiment with High Dynamic Range photography with a view to learning what it takes to preserve image quality.

It bears adding that my goal with HDR has nothing to do with some sort of distorted presentation of reality, with exaggerated colors and tonal ranges. Far from it. Simply stated, all I wish to accomplish is good scene details, from shadow to highlight, where ordinary one shot photography will not do. Typically, this means the use of HDR is germane to high contrast scenes. If you want truly garish HDR results you need go no further than Google. Some of these efforts make Thomas Kincade’s genuinely foul painting look tasteful by comparison.

To try to see if this sort of thing could be done with a hand-held camera I set the 5D to take three exposures, each 2 stops apart, with the camera set on multiple exposure motor drive. Then all it takes is to take a manual reading of a mid-tone area, focus and keep the shutter button depressed. The 5D bangs off three exposures in one second, one correctly exposed, and one each 2 stops over and under. You can do less than 2 stop steps, but 2 seems to be the done thing in the HDR world.

When I got home I had 36 pictures on the CF card, meaning 12 sets of three each. Because of Aperture’s superb engineering, I dropped these RAW files into Apple’s application and seconds later all 36 snaps were on the screen. Then, dialing in Stack->Auto stack, I told the program to stack all images three or fewer seconds apart and, hey presto!, I had 12 stacks with three images each. Seconds later I had exported one of the stacks as high quality JPGs (12 mB each) to a new folder on the hard disk. Opening up Photomatix’s stand alone progam I executed Automate->Batch Process and told the application to ‘Align Images’ before processing, which took some 2 minutes. Photomatix exports the HDR JPG in a new sub-folder where the images reside, and the JPG can then be dropped on Photoshop for final adjustments – meaning the highlight slider in Levels is moved to the left, Smart Sharpen is applied (300/1/0 for the 5D is what Canon redommends) and the file is saved.

Back into Aperture, import the result and add it to your stack as the first image and you are done. It’s nice to keep the original RAW files as doubtless some day a better HDR application will become available, thoguh I find it hard to criticize Photomatix.

Here’s how it looks:

The Aperture screen with the HDR image on left with source images.

And here is a larger view of the result:

The HDR processed result.

As you can see, the very natural looking result preserves a full tonal range despite the extremely harsh midday sunlight. But there is a snag. Look at the car’s wheel rim and you will see that the images are misaligned. I didn’t get this problem when doing indoor tests on a tripod (see the previous columns) and examination of the other HDRs from this outing disclosed the problem in varying degrees in each picture. What appears to be happenning is that I am slightly twisting the camera between pictures, probably reacting to the noise of the motor drive. As a result, whereas the centers of all images are sharp, the peripheries show clearly overlapping images. So for this photographer, at least, it seems a tripod is de rigeur for mulit-image HDR pictures. The indoor shots taken with a tripod disclose no image degredation when compared with the originals.

Here’s one more example of what HDR can do for tonal range:

The Aperture screen with the HDR image top left, with source images.

And here is a larger view of the result:

The HDR processed result.

There’s less edge blurring in this one – I must have been steadier – but when you enlarge the result it’s still there.

It’s no great secret that I think Ansel Adams was a mediocre photographer, at best. What made his pictures jump out at you is his superb darkroom technique. He would think nothing of spending days over a print, messing with chemicals, paper grades and manual dodging and burning. If the poor sap had only waited, he could have snapped up a copy of Photomatix and saved himself a lot of trouble. His example is instructive, though. Good technique cannot make a great print from a poor original.

After these few experiments with HDR I think I understand what good technique means. Now I have to take some good originals!