Tuesday night at the Photo Club meeting we had two members present a body of work. This is essentially a photographic project. One of the fellows did his work using HDR to make composite photos in black and white. He mentioned that during the time he took the photos he was using HDR all the time. I was a little surprised at that. I always thought that HDR was handy when you have a subject where the histogram spills over high and low. I guess I am wrong. Anyway, I went out to Bay Area Park (of course). I couldn't find a scene where the histogram spilled over in a normal exposure, so I just did some shooting.

Many cameras (the 5d Mk3 included) will do an in-camera HDR rendition. I tried that and also tried using Lightroom's HDR function. Today's photo shows the camera result on top and the Lightroom rendition on the bottom. You are probably thinking, "Whoa, what a difference!" Well the difference is interesting. The camera just merges the frames while Lightroom actually does quite a bit of adjustments. Luckily it does it with Develop module adjustments so you can take them out if you wish. When you do that the result looks a lot like the top one.

So what, you ask. Well, I have to say that I don't think I will be fooling around with HDR very much until I find something that warrants its use. I will mention that a lot of HDR photos are really single exposures where a bit (or a lot, sometimes) of contrast enhancement and tone mapping are used. These are nice photos which teeter into art. I like looking at them, but pushing it too far is not my style.

I had fun and learned something.