An Interview with Bill Brignoni on HDR Photography

Wharf

American Artists Gallery: Wow! Where is this (Wharf)? And how did you get this shot?

Bill  Brignoni: (This is) Channel Islands Harbor, in Oxnard. It's five exposures merged, blended and tone mapped in Photoshop's CS5 (HDR). 

AAG: Did you purposely take each of those 5 images, or did you pick them  from a larger group of shots? Was it your intention to do this at the  time you shot or did it come together afterward?

BB: It’s a  process known as "High Dynamic Range" or HDR photography. You make the  conscious decision at the time of capture. Some images may contain 9  exposures range. It all depends on the tonal values of the particular scene you’re trying to capture. You meter the scene at "0" then you  bracket your shots accordingly up and down -1 -2 0 1+ 2+ or half stop  increments depending on what your desired outcome is to be.

In  the case of this image (Wharf), I had a setting sun on my right, so I was quickly losing light (desired), and by exposing at the different  values I was able to capture the shadows as they filled with the "dropping" sunlight and catch the hue and glow as the sun settled. After processing the image, it just became a matter of tweaking the colors  for the surreal/painted like effect in the final rendering…

Tree

(Tree) is an HDR rendered image. However it was more of a subtle process. I wanted a more natural "this is how I saw it" type of finish. The real work here was performed in Lightroom 3.4. I just wanted to take  advantage of the depth of field that HDR processing gives back and then  built on that.

Posted in: