Shooting HDR for Landscape
By Rachel Ross Introduction Very quickly it’s important to establish what HDR merging is and why it’s so useful for landscape photography – because it is. If you’ve ever picked up a camera you’ll know that what the camera captures often doesn’t quite match what you see with your eyes, especially in situations of high contrast. Your eyes and brain work in tandem to provide an image that is balanced through the entire tonal range, but cameras aren’t quite there yet. Cameras still struggle to capture the full dynamic range spectrum of darks, shadows, mid-tones and highlights in a single frame, as usually a camera will expose the shadow areas correctly or the highlights or takes some average of the two that doesn’t accurately expose any of it. HDR merging is the solution, as it captures the full range of tones in multiple frames of the same scene (this is ‘bracketing’), and blends them together to show the full range of light in a single image. So, HDR is really perfect when you want to …