Playing with HDR Photography

I'm somewhat new to photography and have been hearing quite a bit about HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography and decided to give it a try. I needed a subject so I had my oldest son who is getting really good at origami make a paper fish for me. Then I created a back drop from white printer paper and set up in my living room. I did some reading and found that HDR works best when you change the shutter speed on every shot to get different exposures vs changing the aperture which would change the field of depth. I set up bracketing on my camera to take 3 shots with one under and one over exposed. A great trick I learned as well is to set the shutter mode to continuous which would let me hold down the shutter and it would automatically stop after the three images were taken. I initially started out by taking my 35mm lens and taking some close-up shots of the fish. This is when I ran into my first problem. I found that the boca effect that I like so much in my portrait shots made for an image with very fuzzy edges when processed as an HDR picture. I tried another lens which took a very crisp shot, but I had problems getting enough light to properly expose the image. I borrowed some lamps from the kids, but still didn't get what I wanted so I finally resorted to increasing my ISO setting.

Next came one of my favorite parts of getting onto the computer and doing the post processing. I loaded up the images in Lightroom and found the auto stack feature which groups images by the time they were taken to be a huge time saver. It made it very easy to group my images into sets for processing. I then did some scrubbing through my images to find the set that I liked the very best and then clicked the option to edit them as an HDR image in PhotoShop. After a minute or two of processing I was pretty impressed with the outcome and was able to do some minor tweaking to get an image that I was very pleased with. I then did a bit more post processing in PhotoShop to isolate the white background and change the background color.

Being somewhat new to photography I was quite pleased with the outcome of this exercise. I have a lot of other ideas where I would like to use HDR and was glad for the learning experience that this brought. I liked the image enough that I have been using it for my avatar on the various sites that I go to. I think that it manages to say a bit more about me than most images that I could have picked since the fish was made by my son and I took the image myself.