Styles of Photography HDR

If you’ve spent time around highly technical photographers, read landscape photo magazines or been on a dedicated photo trip, you’ve probably come across the term “HDR” photography. HDR stands for “High Dynamic Range” and is a clever way to deal with challenging lighting conditions (i.e., lots of shadows, highlights, midtones, etc.).

For what is a somewhat complicated-sounding term, it’s a pretty simple concept in practice. Basically, when engaging “HDR mode,” your camera takes three identical photos of the same scene, each with different exposures—one too dark, one too light, and one just right (the Goldilocks of photography, I suppose you could say!). Generally, this is referred to as “bracketing,” and your camera underexposes a shot by -1, then overexposes a shot at +1, and then takes an even shot at 0.

If these numbers and terms don’t mean much to you, you may wish to check out Exposure & Light on page 26 to learn more about your camera’s exposure settings.

Once your camera takes these photos, the magic begins. In newer, fancier cameras, there is internal software that merges these three photos