What Makes a Photo Look Real?
You know how listening to music on a friend’s pricey Bose headphones makes it harder to tolerate your tinny little speakers at home, or watching your favorite show on a high-definition screen spoils you for regular TV? I’m at a moment like that in the way I look at photographs. For the last few weeks, I’ve been playing around with a new computerized technique called high dynamic range (HDR) photography, which can lend a stunning level of brightness, contrast, and detail to digital images. And now every traditional non-HDR image that I see looks flat and dull by comparison.
It’s a dilemma, actually, because the HDR “look” can be peculiar, artificial, even surreal. If you lived in a world where every photograph was made this way, you’d have a constant migraine. But for now, I’m a little bit addicted to HDR (see my Flickr photoset of HDR photos of New England here). And at the risk of getting you addicted, too, I want to talk this week about how the technique works, what you can do with it, and how it can help all of us question some of the conventions and expectations we’ve built up around the art of photography, and around the related art of looking at photographs.
HDR images are unusual because they don’t represent a single moment in time, like most photos, but rather are digital fusions of several images of the same scene, taken at different exposure levels. (In photography, the longer the exposure time, the more light gets captured by a camera’s film or digital sensor, and the brighter the resulting image.) To collect raw material for an HDR image, photographers generally take at least three pictures: one that’s underexposed, one that’s overexposed, and one at a normal exposure. This is called exposure bracketing.
(This is an excerpt from the November 6, 2009 edition of World Wide Wade. To continue reading, please see the full column on Xconomy.)
