St. Mary’s church

A photographer goes beyond technique to the importance of subject matter and the character of HDR photographers.

LEARNING TO SEE

Beyond its techniques, what makes for lasting HDR work is the symbolic meaning that viewers perceive in the subject matter. Memorable HDR images, like symphonic melodies, are complex creations with interesting ideas about content, lighting, and composition. Their strength does not rest on how many exposures were taken, nor in the manner the picture was processed. Part of the strength of the image is the character of the photographer.

When HDR was introduced to photographers, they were initially shocked because biases got in the way and influenced how it was seen. It was common to view an HDR photograph relative to a landscape printed from film. Some critics insisted that the HDR nature image, for instance,  should be both true to nature and a beautiful object. This over-insistence on truth, and a historical notion of beauty echoed the mindset of mid 19th-century viewers who were trained to see nature photographs with the same eyes previously trained to judge romantic paintings for centuries before.

 
Stained Glasses

BEYOND GOOD VS. BAD

I argue that subject matter makes a photograph interesting, not the technique. As we learn to see HDR, and become skilled in judging it, we must let go of rigid good vs. bad judgments. To survive as a worthwhile contribution to photography, HDR pictures must have content and composition. At best, we know that some photographs are more interesting than others.
Subject matter outlasts style.  We do not care, 150 years after Edward Muybridge stopped the motion of a horse, that much of his work was carefully edited. We recall and relate only that he captured all four horse's feet off the ground in the same instant.

Not unlike the early effort of  19th century photography such as the Daguerreotype, HDR’s promised gift is its unparalleled detail.

Photographers who love HDR do so in part because the finished image offers a way to control contrast so that details in highlights and shadows are clear. Consider the range of light in the image of St. Mary’s church above. A difficult capture with film that might require flash, the image easily shows an extended tonal range with crisp detail.

Seeing HDR photography, we should avoid getting stuck in notions of good vs. bad and about this detail. Every HDR image is a subjective slice, from a chosen viewing angle.  The essence of seeing HDR photography does not lie in making judgments of good taste vs. bad taste. Human vision is a spectrum:  there are realistic HDR photographers who wish to accurately revive the scene before them. There are also impressionists who want to catch the impression that the scene left upon them. If you are a realist, you may say impressionist HDR is less interesting to you, but this opinion does not make all impressionist HDR bad art. Judging all of it as bad is an error. And yet, this is exactly how critics have judged tone mapping, a way of combining bracketed exposures to make a high dynamic range image.

HDR TECHNIQUES

There are two main processes used by HDR software programs: tone mapping and exposure blending. Tone mapping is a way to expand or compress the tones beyond the range of a single exposure. Photomatix® from HDRsoft is often used. The goal is to show an enhanced range of tones for monitor display. Exposure blending, another technique, uses layers ( either in Photomatix, Photoshop®  or another software program), to select the best parts of many registered frames and put them together. Countless references and tutorials on YouTube and online show how to do tone mapping and exposure blending.

While tone mapping is merely an equation in an HDR software programs that tries to keep details while reducing contrast, it can produce halos and a saturated, contrasty look to photographs. However, tone mapping can also be subtle so its effects are natural. Tone mapping is like health care: a politicized debate has swamped the subject matter. 

 

Yesterday’s Noose

WHAT IF I AM JUST STARTING OUT WITH HDR?

For beginners, a key to exploring HDR is to forget the debate, and to approach learning it in a playful way with an open, curious mind. After reading tutorials and watching You-Tube videos, beginners have the opportunity to explore HDR. After installing HDR software and taking a bracketed series of shots, HDR newcomers can find their photography enlivened and energized. Using HDR over time gives photographers digital thinking, a way of anticipating how to approach a scene with digital mindset.

Having concepts like exposure blending in mind helps a photographer to explore contrasting scenes that before appeared difficult to visualize, and perhaps were passed over as too tough to capture. They learn to see dark or high contrast scenes as a challenge. The image above, Yesterday’s Noose, attempts to move beyond the challenge to a question about the subject itself: is the noose by the river there from a hanging, or was it used for play?

ANSWERING HDR CRITICS

Critics often misunderstand images made with the extended dynamic range process, and attack the photographer directly, getting away from the photograph. For instance, tone mapping efforts have been slandered, and tone mapping has been heavily criticized as unnatural. I attempt, later on, to answer the critics by outlining characteristics of authentic HDR photographers, and I welcome constructive critique.

Bashing the appearance of HDR pictures, repeated in countless web discussions, is now a tired cliché. Fact check — high strength tone mapping is only sparingly used by experienced HDR photographers to maximize detail without the image noise that tone mapping can cause.

Think of some tone mapping, perhaps, as the heavy metal of the HDR music world. It has its place at one end of the spectrum of HDR techniques. It’s not a matter of good taste vs. bad taste, it’s a spectrum of expression to show the subject matter in all its symbolic meaning. Photography is about the subject matter, and the subjective expression and character of the photographer, not the specific HDR process.

Instead of seeing the content of the entire play, HDR critics have picked apart the actors and how they appear under stage lighting. Obsessed by flaws they see when beginners’ use tone mapping, like Shakespeare’s MacDuff the critics exclaim:  “Oh horror! horror! horror! Tongue, nor heart, Cannot conceive nor name thee!” They make the error of blaming the photographer, and ignore the context and content of the image.

Critics also charge that pictures made with HDR are “over-cooked.” This description is also a tired cliché. Because it looked different on the surface, tone-mapped HDR did not meet critics expectations. While intelligent criticism comes from the love of tradition, it also mistakenly attacks photographers if the critic expects a photo to be an accurate document. Often, criticism of nature scenes done with tone mapping arose from seeing  photos as not natural, and expecting them to be so. Yet, nature photographers have never accurately shown a landscape. They have always used photography to interpret nature.

The online debate that HDR, and tone mapping in particular, haves engendered recycle a controversy that swept photography in the 1890’s.
 

Today’s debate over how HDR photographs look, and should look, revives a similar photography controversy from the 1880’s in the US and UK. That was a decade when photography was divided between the Realists and the Impressionists in photographic theory. The English photographer Dr. Peter Henry Emerson proposed a theory of vision. Arguing that photography should imitate the eye, he knew the eye saw sharpness only at the center of the visual field, while the periphery of vision appeared softer and slightly blurred compared with the center. Emerson made platinum prints that had a wide and beautiful tonal range, and he printed these images so that only their center was sharp, so they were slightly out of focus towards the edges. He was seeking what he considered to be a naturalistic photography and a natural expression.

Prior to Emerson, edge-to-edge sharpness was a photographer’s main concern. Although criticized for being in a “fuzzy school,”  Emerson and his promotion of photography as an independent Pictorial art became the foundation for the Photo-Secessionist school of international photographers including Alfred Stieglitz and many others. This controversy, over what is a natural photograph, is recycled and repeated by our current debate, in 2010, about the relationship of HDR to photography, and it tries to categorize what is HDR art or true HDR.

Due to the surprise when HDR initially did not meet our expectations that it must be factual and accurate, we forgot a lesson from photography's history.  There has never been “Truth” in a photograph. Looking at a landscape picture, we like to think that if we went to the same place and looked at the identical scene, then we would see exactly what we saw previously in a photograph of that place.

We are wrong. The scene always looks different than the picture of the scene. People never resemble their portraits, actors always look different in person than in their movies. In fact, the more we recognize “just another rock, just another tree” in a picture, the more boring that picture is. Inexperienced tone mapping looked so unusual at first it caused only irritation and our habitual response was “but that's not real.” Getting stuck in Fact-Fantasy argument is not a reason to throw the HDR instrument section of the photographic orchestra. 

Buy a popular photography magazine at the store. You'll read about HDR as the new Messiah of Photography. It is not. Those of us who adopted HDR early were so enthusiastic about it that we revived the cry of earlier photographers that, in itself, using HDR techniques was automatically interesting.  Wrong again. Good photography is what is interesting. HDR has a chance of elevating photography in an interesting way if it is made by caring, authentic photographers.

Mr. Jim Goldstein of Seattle, an award-winning commercial professional noted for his outstanding nature and landscape work, and the host of the EXIF and Beyond podcast, is a photographer I admire. In 2007, Mr. Goldstein posted a thought-provoking critique of HDR. Goldstein argued then that those photographers who did HDR approached it as a novelty rather than a solution.

This is an excellent point. The intent and experience of the person behind the HDR software controls is what makes the image interesting. When HDR tools are used as a style, without criteria, we get the sense the image maker is just shooting and not thinking. However, there is nothing wrong with trying novel imaging, it harms no one.

Goldstein went on to argue that HDR on the Flickr.com social photography website was overused and extreme, and that only rarely was HDR used to produce prints close to what the human brain can see.  It is a mistake to try to compare how the brain sees with how the camera sees for two reasons. First, neuro-scientists are just beginning to learn complexities of our central nervous system’s visual processing and it is nothing like a camera.  Second, before the 1880’s, camera and eye were parallel tools. This changed when Edward Muybridge photographed all four hoofs of a horse in the air, something the eye could never see. After Muybridge’s “instantaneous photography,” natural and photographic vision diverged. The camera does not assemble a scene meaningfully, but the brain can.

Mr. Goldstein calls Flickr members “would-be photographers and artists,” but this yet another tired, old critique. Over a hundred years ago, Charles Baudelaire, an exalted character and opium smoker, condemned photography as the refuge of “would-be artists.” There is no shame in being a would-be or amateur photographer. Fact is, amateurs have made brilliant advancements in photography. All photographers were amateurs, at some point along the path to evolving their vision. 

However, Goldstein does not lump all those who use HDR into one category, and adds that “there are some photographers producing very naturally-looking HDR images, but regrettably they are the exception.” A thread reply, on the web underneath Goldstein's article, states that “most (HDR) images are completely butchered, and that this is especially true of nature and landscape photographs.” This is because we have a long-standing bias that nature and landscape photographs somehow more in the realm of reality, and, as such, should not be enhanced or manipulated.

With time, HDR software will improve and better nature photography will emerge. Think of the work of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, David Muench, Elliot Porter and John Sexton, all landscape masters who had decades to polish their work, radical as it was when they each began to produce their prints. The point is that patience with HDR is required. Photographers, meanwhile, must not be attacked, but encouraged to explore HDR. It is time to recognize as myth the idea of  photographers producing images close to what the brain can see, or close to “the truth.”

Goldstein criticizes HDR images as not meant for the commercial world. Yet, a large percentage of HDR photos on the web are experimental. They were not meant for commercial use. Of course, there are categories of HDR photography that are commercial; HDR portrait and wedding  photography is a fast-growing field. However, on the Flickr website, HDR images tend to be made as part of a learning process and to try new ideas, and not as HDR milestones.

Playing your HDR instrument well requires practice;  like any instrument newly added to an experienced ensemble or orchestra, its presence can sweeten or foul the air depending on who is playing. But let’s shift the topic now from the instrument and its techniques, to the image maker.

WHAT IS THE CHARACTER OF THE HDR PHOTOGRAPHER IN THE DIGITAL AGE?

Today photography is shaped by the technology of our digital information age. Today’s magazine covers are retouched, they show digital photographs that were manipulated, and not revealing the enhancement to a portrait. Since a digital image serves commercial, advertising, amateur and many other purposes, the motivation and context of the image is important. A core issue that makes HDR images interesting is the character of the photographer. The image above, “Chevy Above the Levy” was taken purely for amateur purposes. HDR tools were used to make it.  Of the photograph, we could ask “ Who took it? ” An even better question is: “what are the qualities of the photographer, and ideally what should they be?”

Borrowing a page from Walker Evans, an F.S.A. photographer of whom entire biographies have been written, I’ve chosen four characteristics for the authentic HDR photographer. HDR photographers can strive to have these qualities.

1. They have absolute fidelity to the medium of photography. They strive to use the HDR camera as the incredible instrument of symbolic actuality that it is. An authentic HDR photographer respects the portrait subject.

2. An authentic HDR photographer uses HDR methods to serve a larger purpose than the technique itself.  If they use tone mapping, XDR, exposure fusion, texture fusion, Orton, or bracketed exposures- the processing is done to create an uncontrived result.

3. Composition is everything. The HDR work shows a rightness of framing-what is put in and what is left out.  The image space in an HDR photograph is distinctly defined.

4. They employ a general, but unobtrusive technical mastery with their HDR processing.

Walker Evans, working briefly for the Farm Security Administration during the Depression, developed these criteria to define qualities of seasoned photographers, and I’ve applied them to the HDR photographer. In the hands of these photographers, the HDR process can be one of symbolic actuality. HDR photography as its best expresses the humanity, symbolism, or feeling of the scene, portrait, or nature image; its maker can choose HDR techniques as part of the craft, not to shout out that it’s art because high dynamic range methods were used.

NEW THINKING TO HANDLE HDR TOOLS

Emerging HDR photography demands new thinking in addition to digital photograph concepts. Once again, new camera/computer technology changes how we can see. When the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson wielded his newly introduced Leica in the 193o’s, he challenged a more static approach to that had preceded him. Almost for the next decade, the mainstream photographic community of his day responded to his vision by deriding his camera as a toy.

As HDR techniques  become second nature, the clarity of the picture idea and the photographers character become more important. Photographs are more than dynamic range, color, depth of focus,  and composition. They have an intent. The intent is deeper than finding solutions to the problems of high contrast, washed out highlights, and blocked shadows. Being an authentic HDR photographer is not solely about mastering HDR tools any more than samurai wisdom arises only from having a sharp sword. As a surgeon would employ years of training to use a scalpel, mastering HDR tools can mean knowing when to cut and when to abstain from doing so. 

SUMMARY

HDR photography can be uncontrived, distinct, subtle, and still allow photographers to express the exquisite detail present in the subject itself. It can strive to show a fully realized image that resonates with viewers. HDR critics should let go of rigid good vs. bad judgments, and Fact vs. Fantasy categories. An emphasis on the HDR photographer’s  character can help make HDR work interesting to viewers. We can heighten our appreciation for HDR photography and its growing practice. 

        

James Austin has been a commercial, studio, wedding, and nature photographer. He now devotes his daily image making to adventure photography. For the past decade Austin has written on photography for Apogee Photo Magazine and he is the author of three photography books including Photopia: Seeing Far and Wild. 
        

While his work was exhibited at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in Washington, D.C. , the Photographer's Gallery in Denver, and the Denver Art Museum, James was an assistant professor teaching digital imaging in the Design Department of Metro State College of Denver.  Austin currently teaches adventure photography workshops. An Adobe Certified Expert, he instructs photographers in digital imaging work-flow and Photoshop.