HDR Landscapes

This is a HDR shot I took from a watchtower last summer. Hope you like it :-)

Click on picture for 1600 x 1200 version.

Just took a walk on this beautiful autumn sunday. Click on the picture for a 2560×1600 version (large file!).

Took these two pictures earlier today. Click on the pics for the 1600×1200 versions. Enjoy!

The submission form is online!

I’d like to encourage you to submit your HDR photos to be considered for publication on this website. Of yourse you retain all rights to your work. I will add a link to your website if you want to. Just click here to submit your work!

In this post I will give you a short idea of how I’m creating my HDR images. Let’s start with the finished picture. It’s called “Silence”, and I took it earlier this year (April I think). I really don’t like to get up early in the morning, but it’s necessary to take these kind of pictures :-(

What do you need to make a HDR image like this? First of all, a tripod. You have to take three (or even more) pictures with different exposure, and your camera has to be fixed to do that, otherwise your final image will be blurred. This image was taken with my Pentax istD, a DSLR camera. Producing an HDR image requires taking enough separate exposures so that you place all of the brightness levels that you want in your final image into a range that your camera’s sensor can record properly. Ideally this means putting the darkest values no lower than somewhere in the mid-range of the sensor’s sensitivity range. According to Adobe’s instructions you want to take enough exposures to cover the complete dynamic range – not less than three, and as many as five to seven, or even more. For “Silence” I took 3 single shots and used the autobracket feature. Auto Bracket mode lets you shoot a burst of three exposures at different settings that can be set from + or - 2 stops. Here’s the result:

OK, after takin’ these pics I drove back home, got me a cup of coffee and fired up Photomatix Pro. This program allows you to merge your source images into one new HDR image. Just check out their website for more information. I will write some more detailed stuff about this program soon.

In a nutshell, this is how I create my pictures. A lot of people wanted to know how “Silence” was created, I hope this will lighten things up a bit.

More pictures and details are coming soon, so please check back.