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HDR Photo Gallery

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HDR Image of Sunset Over the Aramoho Railway Bridge
Wanganui, New Zealand
(c) John Corney 2010
  You can read what HDR (high dynamic range) photography is by visiting my HDR Photo Gallery, but in the meantime if you are you wondering what you need to be able to take HDR photos yourself, here's a list of what it takes.

Camera:
  1. A digital SLR camera set to the "aperture" setting (on a Canon camera this is the AV setting on the dial...perhaps someone with a Nikon or other brand of camera can post the equivalents in the comments section below?) 
  2. The ability to specify "bracketing" for your camera (Select AEB under the camera menu for a Canon camera, and then spin the wheel and choose the level of exposure value spacing you wish to shoot at - I always use steps of 2)
  3. Set your drive setting to "multiple exposures" (with AEB set, your Canon camera will take 3 exposures while you continue to depress the shutter)
Software:
  1. Photoshop CS4 or higher (CS5 has greatly improved its HDR handling) or other proprietary HDR software such as Photomatix or Dynamic Photo HDR to process the bracketed images into one HDR file which can then be manipulated in a process known as "tone-mapping".
Other Recommendations:
  1. Whenever possible, shoot HDR brackets using a tripod since you don't want any movement or shake while taking the multiple exposures since the individual images will be layed on top of each other and any movement while the photos are being exposed will result in ghosting in the final HDR image.
  2. A cable release or wireless remote to further reduce the risk of moving the camera while the bracket is being exposed.
HDR is a lot of fun and you can come up with some amazing outcomes. You'll be pretty surprised. Once again, you can see some examples and read more about what HDR is at my HDR photo gallery.

And you are welcome to post any of your examples of your own HDR images on my Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/photosbyjohncorney.

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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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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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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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