Fine Art Photography: High Dynamic Range: Realism, Superrealism, & Image Optimization for Serious Novices to Advanced Digital Photographers
By Tony Sweet
4/5
()
About this ebook
Read more from Tony Sweet
Fine Art Digital Nature Photography Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fine Art Flower Photography: Creative Techniques and the Art of Observation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fine Art Photography: Water, Ice & Fog: Photographic Techniques and the Art of Interpretation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to Fine Art Photography
Related ebooks
Dramatic Black & White Photography Using Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCreative Black and White: Digital Photography Tips and Techniques Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/550 Things Photographers Need to Know About Focus: An Enthusiast's Guide Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPost Processing: A Guide For Nature Photographers Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Tabletop Photography: Using Compact Flashes and Low-Cost Tricks to Create Professional-Looking Studio Shots Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Enthusiast's Guide to Exposure: 49 Photographic Principles You Need to Know Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Landscape Photographer's Guide to Photoshop: A Visualization-Driven Workflow Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Fine Art Printing for Photographers: Exhibition Quality Prints with Inkjet Printers Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Digital Landscape Photography Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Enthusiast's Guide to Multi-Shot Techniques: 49 Photographic Principles You Need to Know Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHow to Improve Your Digital Photography Volume 1 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCapture One Pro 10: Mastering Raw Development, Image Processing, and Asset Management Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Indispensable Guide to Lightroom CC: Managing, Editing, and Sharing Your Photos Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Photoshop CC and Lightroom: A Photographer's Handbook Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Take Control, Go Manual Part 3 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Digital Zone System: Taking Control from Capture to Print Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Make Your Photography Pay Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMastering the Nikon D800 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Take Control, Go Manual Part 1 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsExposure Mastery: Aperture, Shutter Speed & ISO: The Difference Between Good and Breathtaking Photographs Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Freelance Photojournalism & Stock Photography: A Professional Guide Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBlack and White Digital Photography Photo Workshop Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Mastering Photoshop Layers: A Photographer's Guide Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Photography Pocket Guide: Camera Settings with Sample Photos for Specific Scenarios Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBlack and White Photography in the Digital Age Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Minimalist Photographer Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Mastering Nik Viveza Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPhotography of Life and Living: The Black and White Book Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWaiting for the Light Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Photography For You
Betty Page Confidential: Featuring Never-Before Seen Photographs Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The iPhone Photography Book Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Conscious Creativity: Look, Connect, Create Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Boys: A Memoir of Hollywood and Family Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Bloodbath Nation Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Haunted New Orleans: History & Hauntings of the Crescent City Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Patterns in Nature: Why the Natural World Looks the Way It Does Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Book Of Legs Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Photography Exercise Book: Training Your Eye to Shoot Like a Pro (250+ color photographs make it come to life) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWisconsin Death Trip Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Extreme Art Nudes: Artistic Erotic Photo Essays Far Outside of the Boudoir Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5On Photography Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Photographer's Guide to Posing: Techniques to Flatter Everyone Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Through the Lens of Whiteness: Challenging Racialized Imagery in Pop Culture Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWorkin' It!: RuPaul's Guide to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Style Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Bare Bones Camera Course for Film and Video Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Humans of New York: Stories Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Six Flags Over Georgia Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Edward's Menagerie: Dogs: 50 canine crochet patterns Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Astrophotography Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Tree a Day: 365 of the World’s Most Majestic Trees Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFucked at Birth: Recalibrating the American Dream for the 2020s Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ballet for Everybody: The Basics of Ballet for Beginners of all Ages Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Fifty Places to Hike Before You Die: Outdoor Experts Share the World's Greatest Destinations Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Photography for Beginners: The Ultimate Photography Guide for Mastering DSLR Photography Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Concise History of Florida Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Historic Photos of West Virginia Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Lost Towns of North Georgia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDeclutter Your Photo Life: Curating, Preserving, Organizing, and Sharing Your Photos Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Reviews for Fine Art Photography
1 rating0 reviews
Book preview
Fine Art Photography - Tony Sweet
Fine Art
Photography
High Dynamic Range
TONY SWEET
STACKPOLE
BOOKS
Contents
Foreword
Prelude
Photos
Epilogue
Equipment for HDR photography
Product Links
Acknowledgments
Foreword
THE JOURNEY INTO PHOTOGRAPHY CAN BE DIFFICULT FOR MANY CREATIVE people. It is a constant balance between the technical and the artistic. Before one can truly develop one’s own style, a firm understanding of how to control the tools of photography is essential. Only after mastering their function can one begin to explore one’s own inner creative drive.
With advances in High Dynamic Range digital processing, a new frontier has opened up in modern photography. This new frontier has its own set of technical challenges. Understanding how to master them is integral to understanding how they will affect your image and, ultimately, creative expression.
Tony Sweet’s always-evolving work shows how new advances in digital photography can lead to exciting and creative image making. Tony has become one of the leading gurus in High Dynamic Range photography, quickly absorbing and masterfully applying the wide range of processing techniques available in HDR. Whether it’s understanding field techniques to capture the most dynamic range in a scene or mastering the many postprocessing looks, Tony will guide you through all the steps to achieve the desired effect.
His work is inventive, instinctive, and inspiring. But what makes Tony stand out in the field of photography is his generosity in sharing what he has learned with other photographers, both amateur and professional. He has an infectious excitement about creating images and that is passed on to those who have studied photography with him.
You could not have picked a better mentor to start your journey into High Dynamic Range photography with than Tony Sweet.
—Gregory McKean
www.MasterPhotoWorkshops.com
Gregory’s series, Master Photo Workshops, has released ten feature-length video titles on photography ranging from classic landscape techniques to advanced digital processing and High Dynamic Range. The series features top working professionals teaching their craft in the field and in the studio.
Prelude
HIGH DYNAMIC RANGE PHOTOGRAPHY HAS BECOME A STAPLE IN MODERN digital photography. It seems that everyone is generating HDR images these days. HDR images are all over online photo sites such as Betterphoto.com, Flickr, Smugmug, Photobucket, Picasa, Webshots, and so on. It’s become apparent to just about everyone that HDR has possibilities for image making that are finally accessible to any photographer using any digital camera from point-and-shoots to high-megapixel pro-DSLRs.
It may be interesting to know that HDR is not new. Not even close. Here’s a brief history: The first recorded photograph that was the result of combining two images to achieve detail in the brightest and darkest parts of an image was created in 1850 by Gustave Le Gray. This technique is still practiced. What is known today as HDR was was originally developed in the 1930s by Charles Wyckoff. Wyckoff ’s detailed pictures of nuclear explosions appeared on the cover of Life magazine in the mid 1940s. Wyckoff implemented local neighborhood tone remapping to combine differently exposed film layers into one single image of greater dynamic range. After the development of the radiance image file format (RGBE), tone mapping made it possible to display HDR images on computer monitors. This technique was presented to the public by Paul Debevec in 1997.
It was then a short trip to 2005, when Photoshop CS2 introduced the Merge to HDR function. Soon after this, what would soon become the industry standard for HDR software, Photomatix, entered the marketplace. Many HDR programs followed. Among these are Artizen HDR, FDR Tools, Hydra, and Dynamic Photo HDR 4, with more appearing, it seems, daily. The latest entry into the HDR software arena is Nik’s HDR Efex Pro. This is professional-level software on par with Photomatix. For the purpose of this book, we’ll be dealing with Photomotix and HDR Efex Pro exclusively. These two HDR programs are currently the choice of a great majority of professionals and serious amateurs. Many other HDR books have comparisons between the various HDR software, so that information is readily available. This book will forego comparisons, instead focusing on practical settings in many different shooting situations using the two most popular HDR programs being used today.
HDR can have a stylized look,
which can be the subject of debate in photographic circles. The range of HDR interpretations can vary wildly from absolute realism where the HDR intervention is invisible, through various levels of the HDR look to a complete departure from photography into the realm of nonrepresentational work. It’s all up to the maker. The important thing is that high dynamic range photography is a potent tool in our ongoing pursuit of higher levels of creative expression.
In the real photography world, stock photography agencies tend to shy away from HDR images, as many of them look overprocessed. But it is possible to use HDR to achieve a much less artifical look, replicating what we see naturally. I’ve had natural-looking HDR images accepted readily and without question by stock agencies. However, I also like completely nonrepresentational interpretations, completely straying away from the photographic look. There are many people waiting to get in your face about the merits of the natural look,
as opposed to the phony
HDR look, but these are easy arguments to debunk. To paraphrase the great John Shaw, If I want to record things as they are, I’ll look at them.
Glass filters, graduated NDs, color biases in films, processing techniques in digital, many raw converters that render differently, and so on, all alter the natural look of an image and move images into the realm of interpretation. The interpretive process is paramount in photography—otherwise, why not just take snapshots?
The bottom line: High Dynamic Range has gained a permanent place with ever-increasing importance and popularity in modern digital photography. The sooner