High Dynamic Range At The Symphony?

Symphony’s Full Range

Someone commented on My Final Photo of yesterday that it was a fine use of the High Dynamic Range (HDR) technique.

Indeed, it was, but not for what photographers would consider the normal HDR process of making a series of photos of the same subject with varied exposures so one photo is very dark, holding the highlights, and another is very bright with the shadows having great detail.

In between these two photos are a series of slight exposure changes to capture detail in all elements of the subject.

The photo above was made in that way. There are five exposures combined into one photo that keeps details in the shadows such as the stage and a portion of the crowd, to the highlights, the clouds.

It’s a very distinctive look with clear, even tones for all the possible subjects.

My Final Photo for Sunday, above, is a single frame made with my iPhone 15 Pro Max. iPhone camera software can perform the functions of creating a multiple frame HDR photo into a single frame with highlights and shadows well exposed.

There are some drawbacks to the iPhone HDR look. It’s highly processed in-camera with too much sharpening. It uses a smaller sensor than most cameras and smaller that the drone used for the top photo. It lacks much of the detail from the larger sensors and can create haloing around some objects.

The iPhone looks great on the small screen but not in a larger display.

I did use the HDR technique for the complimented photo just not the way imagined.

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