While I was away I thought I would have a go at HDR photography. I only found out about it a week before I went and didn’t have much chance to learn much about it or try it out before I went. So I thought I would try it out while I was on Skye. In some respects this was a mistake, but in others I have some excellent colour palettes I can work from that are much closer to the colours I see while I am in situ.

The long and the short of it is, that your camera can’t capture such a wide range of colours as your eye can. So the idea is that you take several images with various exposures that can be merged to capture the full density range (hence HDR – high density range). What you really need to accomplish this though is a tripod.

Great – because I got my friend to lug it all the way up to Skye for me in her car. Bad news was I had left the ‘foot’ that connects the camera to the tripod at home without realising. Boo.

I couldn’t read all of the book before I arrived, so I was reading and learning over the course of the holiday. One of the things to avoid is an image with anything in it that moves. Mmmm, a very windy Skye is not a good candidate. This is because each image will be slightly different as the trees/grass/sea moves between each exposure etc. So none of my images were great candidates and none of them are particularly sharp. However, they were a great learning base so that I could go out into the ‘field’ now and be confident of what I was capturing.

Here are some of them. I am showing the original images along with the HDR ones in this slideshow.

I am loving this method of photography and am so pleased I can finally capture the colours I can see. The HDR files are first. See how the original average exposure is so much duller in comparison.

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