Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I. High Dynamic Range & Overcast Light –22 slides Copyright © Kenji Tachibana

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I HDR and Overcast Light : High Dynamic (Tonal) Range: HDR Photography is about drawing with light. Just like drawing with a pencil, drawing with light is also about tones, tonal range, form, separation, and shape. Creating a realistic world on a piece of white paper is a huge challenge with a pencil. The digital camera makes it a whole lot easier. Although, doing it well will take a lot of practice.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I HDR and Overcast Light: My History: I actually got into photography by the back door. I was an art major who was too lazy to do my daily drawing practice. I found it a lot easier to draw with light. I was good at drawing because I was able to observe, see, and draw accurately. I used the same skills when I do photography.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I HDR and Overcast Light : Take a Drawing Class: I also used the knowledge that I gained when trying to render the real world using only a B4 pencil dealing with issues of volume, shape, form, tone, contrast, separation, and shadow.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I HDR and Overcast Light: Gray Scale: It matters to you Whether adjusting the computer monitor or evaluating your image, being able to see the tones 1 to 10 and their separation is very important to you as an image maker. Key phrases are ‘jet black’ to ‘crisp white’. In the coin image, there are both crisp white in the highlight and jet black in the shadows…

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I HDR and Overcast Light: HDR: Hitting the limits HDR refers to a condition where the light in the scenes is too harsh or the subject or scene contains tones outside the 1 to 10 scale. The resulting image will have blown-out highlight, shadows without detail, or both. A workable image will have detail in both the highlight and shadows.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I HDR and Overcast Light: Contrast and Separation: When tones exists outside the grayscale, the scene/subject contrast is too high. One HDR solution is to lower the camera contrast setting. Separation is another important idea to keep in mind and to control. Changing the lighting or the tones in the subject or background is the usual solution.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I HDR and Overcast Light : Avoiding HDR: Not easy to do… Avoid using direct sunlight as your light source. Most indoor light results in HDR tonal conditions. Although HDR condition is not limited to harsh light. It can also result from extreme lighting direction or object /scene with extreme tones. That is the reason why I instruct you not to shoot white, black, or shiny objects.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I HDR and Overcast Light: Seeing HDR: Easiest way to deal with HDR is to avoid it. And to do that, study your object/scene using the squint-view technique.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I HDR and Overcast Light: Dealing with HDR: 1.Changing camera position and/or angle. 2.Changing subject position and/or angle. 3.Lower camera contrast setting. 4.Use special camera feature like Sony’s HDO. 5.Using flash-fill (flash set to EC -1.7). 6.Other…

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I HDR and Overcast Light: On-the-Go Shot: In the few minutes that I had waiting to pick up my wife at the end of the day in downtown Seattle, this grouping of dark buildings caught my eye. The HDR condition was immediately obvious.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I HDR and Overcast Light: Normal Exposure: The clouds are blown out and the building are under exposed which is par for the course under the HDR scene-condition shown. A beginning student would be happy with this result…

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I HDR and Overcast Light: Expose For Detail: I used EC adjustment to over-expose to get detail on the dark buildings. As expected, the background is very over-exposed but I was lucky not to get flair between the very light and very dark.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I HDR and Overcast Light: Best Details: Layer combination retouching The buildings were carefully ‘Selected’ using the polygon marquee tool and ‘Cut’ out as a Part Layer. Then the Part Layer was moved into the normal exposure image and carefully positioned. The combined image was also ‘processed’ to bring back rich blacks and whites. Normal ExposureOver ExposureCombined Details

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Extreme Challenge: A low-key subject grouping in front of a hi- key background. This processed image looks more like what inspired me to take the shot. Controlled HDRKeep the intensity and the detail

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I HDR and Overcast Light: Closer Scrutiny: It’s all about delivering photo- realistic detail. Blowup detail

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I HDR and Overcast Light: RAW Deal: Panasonic made a good marketing decision to combine the RAW capability with the 18x zoom that starts at the super-wide 28mm equivalent. I’ve been waiting years for the RAW capability to come back to compact digitals. My previous super-zoom digital was the Sony H1. It lacked 2 things. The RAW and the super-wide. Even the H7 and H9 didn’t include the features. Although they did include the ability to control HDR with their HDO capability.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I HDR and Overcast Light: Comparisons: Superzoom vs. DSLR Panasonic, Sony, Canon, and Nikon all have super- zooms that easily out perform the low-end DSLR digitals. It’s a lot smaller, lighter, cheaper, with superior handling and picture taking performance. Panasonic is my pick for shooting stills. Although the Canon has superb video capability.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Panasonic SuperZoom Story: New Contender: Panasonic has the numbers, performance, and name going for it. Panasonic is new to the digital arena but Leica name is renowned for superior optics. Although, names and numbers may not add up strong image quality. Now, having used it for a week, I am impressed.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Panasonic SuperZoom Story: 18x Leica Zoom: Spectacular The image to the right was taken with the zoom set to super-wide. I saw a tiny part in the subject that I liked. I maxed out the zoom to 18x and frame what I liked and squeezed off another shot. Check out the next slide…

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Panasonic SuperZoom Story: Spectacular Zoom Range: Both shots were taken from the same camera position. The top example was captured using the 28mm equivalent super-wide. The bottom detail was shot using the 504mm equivalent super-telephoto. Actual numbers were 4.6mm super-wide and the 82.8mm super-telephoto.

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I Aside: Very cool On the Daily-Go Shot: In the 3 minutes that I had waiting to pick up

Teacher: Kenji Tachibana Digital Photography I x End