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Noteworthy Features in General 33

1.2.5 HANDHELD HIGH DYNAMIC RANGE (HDR)
The last multiple-image, in-camera alignment feature is another great
timesaver: High Dynamic Range (often abbreviated HDR). In Appendix A,
I talk about the limited dynamic range of the digital sensor, and how our
eyes can see a significantly greater range of light (bright to dark) than what
the camera can see. Over the past century there have been lots of attempts
to correct this intentional artifact of photographic representation of real
light, trying to render the image so it looks more like how we saw it. The
latest technique for trying to achieve this wider dynamic range comes in
what’s become known as High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography.
The time-honored way to create an HDR image is to put the camera on a
tripod and take 3 (sometimes more) pictures of the same scene, each at
different exposures – some darker, some lighter. Then, you merge them all
in your computer so it sort of looks like the way you saw it in real life. An
example of HDR photography appears in Figure 1-10.
Up until now, HDR photography was labor-intensive and unintuitive – in
fact, I once wrote a whole article on the subject and gave real-life examples
of how to create these images in my Advanced Topics 2 e-booklet
(available from www.FriedmanArchives.com/ebooks) (Sorry for the
shameless plug).
That was HDR the old way. With the most recent generation of cameras,
Sony has made this useful feature significantly easier to use. For starters,
there’s no need for a tripod anymore. With the feature enabled (Section

Figure 1-10: In-camera High Dynamic Range can turn difficult light with blown-out
highlights and too-dark shadows (left) into something a little closer to the way you
remember seeing it (right).