Guide to Choose Digital Camera: Nikon vs Canon vs Sony

Have you heard the story of the two photographers standing together and shooting pictures? One is a professional who makes a living out of taking photographs, and the other is a hobbyist. The professional is taking his pictures with a professional camera and lens, while the amateur is shooting with his basic entry level camera and kit lens. At one point during the shoot, the amateur tells the professional that with his expensive camera and lens, no doubt he would get great images which would make him a lot of money. The professional tries his best to convince him that the camera is only a tool, and that his skills sets do have something to do with the quality of images that he creates. Getting frustrated with the amateur’s constant rejection of this idea, the pro offers to exchange equipment with the amateur for the remainder of the day, and suggests that the photographer with better images at the end of the day gets to keep ALL of the camera gear! The amateur knows when he is beaten, and walks away saying nothing.

This little story just goes to prove that many a time people hide behind the fact that they have lesser equipment than others, and make this an excuse to shoot substandard images.

Merging HDR in Photoshop CS3-CS4 Tutorial

In this tutorial we will take a look at HDR photography. HDRI (High Dynamic Range Imaging) was originally used in 3D and is now in full force in photography. Basically it’s the process of taking multiple exposures and merging them together into a single 32 bit image. Let me explain: A camera is capable of capturing a limited amount of tones in a single photo. Typically we sacrifice elements in a photo when we press the shutter. For example there is a powerful cloudscape and some cliffs. If we expose for the clouds the cliffs become dark. If we set the camera’s exposure to capture detail in the cliffs, the brighter sky is blown out and detail is lost. This is because the human eye can see a larger range of tones than the camera can capture on the chip or film in a single photograph.

Walt Disney World in HDR

With the advent of more powerful personal computers, digital cameras and imaging software, photographers and software engineers created the HDR process of merging a set of digital photographs which would have taken hours of setup in a darkroom and do it in just a few minutes. Today’s blog is just an introduction to HDR as I have recently discovered it myself.

There are two kinds of HDR images. One is created by a set of images I call an HDR set. The second is created from one image which I will cover in three weeks. So, what is an HDR set? To explain that I first have to introduce you to the term bracketing. In photography, bracketing means to take one picture at a given exposure then one or two brighter and one or two darker, in order to obtain the best image. I did this often whenever I was using slide film. Digital sensors are a lot like slide film so when I took up digital photography, I returned to bracketing, especially if the the subject I was photographing had very light and dark areas.

HDR imaging takes bracketing a bit further. Instead of changing a half or a full stop around an exposure, HDR photographers go 2, 3 and sometimes more stops. Digital cameras make it very easy as most come with auto-bracketing settings which will program your camera to take a series of photos plus and minus around the exposure the photographer decides to start with. Auto-bracketing can be truly automatic where one shutter press takes all the photos in sequence or, like my older digital camera, you have to press the shutter for each bracketed photo. To find out how your camera does auto-bracketing, check its manual (haven’t bugged you about reading that in awhile!).