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Bodie HDR Interpretation

Posted
HDR Photo of Bodie State Historic Park CA HDR (high dynamic range) imaging is a fun thing to play around with. You are meant to start with a set of photos of the same shot taken at different exposures, but I find that I get nice effects as in the photo to the left by just taking one photo, using Photoshop RAW processor to create two new copies of the image with a -2 and a +2 exposure value, and then using them and the original image as a set of three to process as an HDR image. You have to use software such as Photoshop or other software programs available for sale to combine the images into one. The highlights of the image are formed using the highlights in the underexposed image, the shadows are formed using the shadows in the overexposed image, and then blended with the correctly exposed image. The outcome is greater detail across the entire dynamic range: shadows, through midtones, to highlights.

In this photo the distant mountains and clouds give a great effect, almost like "sumi-e" or ink drawings.

This and other photos of Bodie can be viewed in the Bodie slideshow gallery or the static html Bodie gallery.

Update: Michael Ziegler who keeps an eye on my photoblog posts, added a comment below asking if I could post the original photo which I thought was a great idea, so here it is:

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Comments

Michael Ziegler said…
Hi John,
I am just beginning to learn about HDR photography, and I appreciate your explanations here. (I always wondered how they got those beautiful effects!)
Just for comparison, do you have a "regular" photo of the same scene? I would be curious as to how the original correctly exposed photo would look by comparison.
Really enjoying your weblog. Thanks for sharing with us!

Mike Z
http://myphotomemries.blogspot.com
June 7, 2008 at 6:18 AM
John Corney said…
Hi Mike,

Nice to hear from you again.

You know when I originally did this post I had thought of posting the original as well! It's a great idea, and I will do it as soon as I get a chance..

John
June 7, 2008 at 8:04 PM
John Corney said…
Hi Mike,

I presume you requested emails for follow-up comments. I have posted the original photo of this HDR version from Bodie.

Thanks,

John
June 10, 2008 at 9:29 PM
Michael Ziegler said…
Thanks for posting the original photo. It makes a great comparison of the technique. I just got back from a road trip from Washington state to Texas, and I took some photos that would do well with this idea. Can't wait to try my hand at it!
Mike Z
http://myphotomemries.blogspot.com
June 14, 2008 at 5:05 PM
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Samoan Youth

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This young man was preparing with his friends for his moment of fame on the stage at the Samoan Village at the Polynesian dance festival called Pasifika in Auckland in March this year. Samoan Youth Canon EOS 20D 1/30sec at f/20 ISO 200 Canon 70-300mm lens at 300mm More photographs from the same Pasifika Festival day can be found in my new post, Faces of Pasifika 2007 — A Day at Auckland's Pacific Festival .
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Before and After: Two Joshua Tree Photographs, Two Painterly Reworkings

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I want to try something a little different in this post — a working walk-through of how two of my Joshua Tree photographs from April of 2011 became two of my newest painterly artworks on Redbubble. Same compositions, same landscape, same afternoon in the Mojave. Very different final pieces. The Raw Photographs Both photographs were taken on a single afternoon trip to Joshua Tree National Park, shot in Canon raw (.CR2) format on my Canon EOS. Raw files are, as any photographer knows, deliberately flat — they carry the maximum amount of information the sensor recorded, without any of the punchy contrast, saturation, or sharpening that a JPEG would apply automatically in-camera. That flatness is a feature: it gives the photographer the widest possible latitude to make choices in post-processing. But it also means a raw file, straight out of the camera, doesn't look like the scene the eye remembers. It looks like the scene the sensor saw, drained of atmosphere. Here are the two r...
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Cool Granny in Her Austin A35 — © John Corney 2026 This one has a real backstory, and I'd like to tell it properly. An Auckland Sighting On one of my annual visits home to New Zealand, I was walking through central Auckland — at the corner of Queen Street and Karangahape Road (K Road, as everyone calls it) — when a small yellow car went past me and stopped me mid-stride. It was a beautifully kept Austin A35, one of the little British runabouts that were everywhere in New Zealand when I was growing up in the fifties and sixties. Driving it was a woman of a certain age with the confident bearing of someone who had been driving that same car, or one like it, for decades. She looked entirely at home behind the wheel. She belonged to the car and the car belonged to her, and neither of them was in any hurry to change. If you know Auckland, that particular corner will register: Queen Stree...
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