‘National Air and Space Museum in HDR’
courtesy of ‘Matthew Straubmuller’

Let’s have the HDR Talk. Much like parents with the “Birds and the Bees Talk,” this is a talk that photographers don’t like to have. Why? Because photographers either love HDR photos or hate them with the heat of 1000 suns.

First things first, what is HDR? HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, and, to put it simply, it is a way to create an image with a wide (or “dynamic”) range of lighting, much as the human eye sees different lighting. Some photographers like it because you can get amazingly colorful images that can just pop (much as we saw with this video). Other photographers also hate it because it can get overused easily, where colors become fictional and the image doesn’t look like it came from the real world. As a friends of mine likes to say: “HDR is easy. Good HDR is hard.” Don’t believe it? Look in the Flickr pool and you’ll see. Continue reading →