You probably have seen pictures of which you were thinking, "how do these people takes such detailed and artistic photographs?" Well, these are probably HDR, High Dynamic Range photos. These photos are (most of the time) a combination of multiple images with different exposure times. This allows you to get much more detail than a normal picture would have. The technique itself is quite old and was first developed in the 1940s.
Castle Waardenburg in the Netherlands made with 3 different exposures in HDR with Photomatrix.
To make HDR photos you need a digital camera that supports RAW format and an image editor such as Photoshop or Photomatrix. (Btw, It is possible to create a HDR photo, with just 1 RAW photo). If you have a Canon DSLR camera, you will find the extra menu (2) when you set the camera to the advanced settings on the camera (P, TV, AV, M). In that menu choose the line that says AEB and with the right arrow on your camera set green pointers under -2, 0, 2 and press 'set'. These are the different exposures we need.
Make sure you have a solid tripod and use the timer function on the camera to take the picture. The camera will automatically take 3 pictures at different exposures. By using the timer instead of pressing the button to take the picture, you're sure that no movement occurs when the tree pictures are taken.
Import the photos into your photo editor program. Adobe CS2 has an option 'Merge to HDR' to generate the HDR picture, but getting the right tone mapping curves is difficult in Photoshop. The photos in this example were generated with Photomatrix, which makes generating HDR photos a breeze.
Sint Jan Church in Den Bosch in HDR
