Jimmy McIntyre - Editor HDR One Magazine
The Mis-education of HDR
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French Journal Day 107 (Travel Diary Day 187)
Journal Title – The mis-education of HDR Photography
This post is designed to offend and educate. It may also bore the non-photographer section of my readership.
Why must it offend anyone? Well, being offended is often a choice and for one reason or another, there’s always a person who chooses to be offended, even in the least offensive of communications.
I live a life of HDR. When I’m not taking or editing photos, I’m running HDR One or writing this HDR journal, or even chatting with people about HDR who have no idea what I’m talking about. It’s a form of autism, my wife thinks.
Every now and then I see a wonderful image that I’m compelled to inquire about. On one such occasion I commented on an image that I was convinced was an HDR and said ‘Wonderful photo. Is this an HDR?’ What I hadn’t realised was that this very popular photographer’s facebook page was in fact a breeding ground for supposed HDR-haters.
I’d stumbled upon a beast that was waiting to be unleashed. The photographer replied ‘I would never do HDR. These are manually blended exposures!!!’ This comment received almost as many Likes as the initial image. The comments from his fans that soon followed were equally abrupt but far less flattering to the what they considered HDR.
This, however, was not the first time I’d encountered this response from ‘professional photographers’. While I didn’t have the time to reply, the lack of manners and common decency would have prevented me from doing so anyway. I have no time for bad manners, especially when the argument in question is horrendously misinformed.
This is for those HDR haters:
HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. That’s it. If you hate HDR, then you hate High Dynamic Range. Manually blending exposures is increasing the dynamic range of light in your image. Your image, therefore, is HDR.
It really is that simple.
There are different HDR processes which produce different results, like Manual Blending, Exposure Fusion and Tone Mapping.
There’s even lots of fancy names for the same thing. Some people invent new names for HDR processes in an attempt to create a new field in which they hope to be pioneers. But, I’m almost sorry if I’m bursting a bubble here, it’s all just HDR.
Some people may even say, ‘Oh, right, well in that case I hate tone mapping’. Again, this is such a ludicrous thing to even think. Tone mapping is nothing more than a way to represent an HDR image. However, tone mapped images can look extremely different – they don’t all look alike. Why would anyone want to ‘hate’ something that can have such a huge amount of variation?
And what about tone mapped images that have some of the original exposures blended back into them. Do you partially hate those images?
Why hate anything at all? I mean, hate murder, by all means. Hate racism – that’s pretty bad. But hating a way of representing imagery that you don’t fully understand yet? That seems like an awful amount of hate for such a meaningless thing.
If it makes you feel better, even slightly elite, or even just part of a special little group, then fair enough. But at the very least, educate yourself on the thing you’ve chosen to hate.
Today’s Photo – An Unknown Place
You’ll probably hate this image – it’s Tone Mapped. I don’t even know what the place is – It’s in France, though.
strange-lands.com/daily/2013/01/18/the-miseducation-of-hd...
The Mis-education of HDR
Daily HDR Blog | HDR One Magazine | Facebook | Twitter | Pinterest | Google+
French Journal Day 107 (Travel Diary Day 187)
Journal Title – The mis-education of HDR Photography
This post is designed to offend and educate. It may also bore the non-photographer section of my readership.
Why must it offend anyone? Well, being offended is often a choice and for one reason or another, there’s always a person who chooses to be offended, even in the least offensive of communications.
I live a life of HDR. When I’m not taking or editing photos, I’m running HDR One or writing this HDR journal, or even chatting with people about HDR who have no idea what I’m talking about. It’s a form of autism, my wife thinks.
Every now and then I see a wonderful image that I’m compelled to inquire about. On one such occasion I commented on an image that I was convinced was an HDR and said ‘Wonderful photo. Is this an HDR?’ What I hadn’t realised was that this very popular photographer’s facebook page was in fact a breeding ground for supposed HDR-haters.
I’d stumbled upon a beast that was waiting to be unleashed. The photographer replied ‘I would never do HDR. These are manually blended exposures!!!’ This comment received almost as many Likes as the initial image. The comments from his fans that soon followed were equally abrupt but far less flattering to the what they considered HDR.
This, however, was not the first time I’d encountered this response from ‘professional photographers’. While I didn’t have the time to reply, the lack of manners and common decency would have prevented me from doing so anyway. I have no time for bad manners, especially when the argument in question is horrendously misinformed.
This is for those HDR haters:
HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. That’s it. If you hate HDR, then you hate High Dynamic Range. Manually blending exposures is increasing the dynamic range of light in your image. Your image, therefore, is HDR.
It really is that simple.
There are different HDR processes which produce different results, like Manual Blending, Exposure Fusion and Tone Mapping.
There’s even lots of fancy names for the same thing. Some people invent new names for HDR processes in an attempt to create a new field in which they hope to be pioneers. But, I’m almost sorry if I’m bursting a bubble here, it’s all just HDR.
Some people may even say, ‘Oh, right, well in that case I hate tone mapping’. Again, this is such a ludicrous thing to even think. Tone mapping is nothing more than a way to represent an HDR image. However, tone mapped images can look extremely different – they don’t all look alike. Why would anyone want to ‘hate’ something that can have such a huge amount of variation?
And what about tone mapped images that have some of the original exposures blended back into them. Do you partially hate those images?
Why hate anything at all? I mean, hate murder, by all means. Hate racism – that’s pretty bad. But hating a way of representing imagery that you don’t fully understand yet? That seems like an awful amount of hate for such a meaningless thing.
If it makes you feel better, even slightly elite, or even just part of a special little group, then fair enough. But at the very least, educate yourself on the thing you’ve chosen to hate.
Today’s Photo – An Unknown Place
You’ll probably hate this image – it’s Tone Mapped. I don’t even know what the place is – It’s in France, though.
strange-lands.com/daily/2013/01/18/the-miseducation-of-hd...