Making multiple pictures with different exposure levels is called exposure bracketing. Exposure Bracketing can be done manually and automatic depending on the possibilities of your camera. Almost all modern digital cameras have a feature called Auto Exposure Bracketing (AEB).
Today I was going through my photographs of 2014 and I stumbled upon a series of HDR photographs I took during our city trip to Budapest in March 2014. I remember it took about one hour and a half to take all the pictures during golden hour and blue hour. Hungary’s Parliament Building is situated at Pest’s riverbank. These photographs are taken on a tripod with my Sony a37 travel camera from the Buda side of the city.
A small anecdote: I remember the evening very good. I was waiting between shots and I was just looking around a bit, chatting to my wife, when a marathon runner, who was doing his daily run, came towards us at high speed. The moment I saw him, I recognised him as my colleague from work in Brussels. After a quick high-five, he continued his run. It must be a small world after all.
Post-processing of the photographs is done in Lightroom and Photoshop using three basic images of different stages of evening sky and upcoming city lights. For some reason I never post-processed these HDR photographs, but I surely like the result. It is a great riverbank view.
A quick thank you to my lovely wife for the patience and the willingness to wait just ‘that little bit longer for that amazing light coming any second now’.
Looking forward to hear your thoughts.
Happy Shooting
If you want to learn exactly how I turned this uninteresting picture into a dramatic eye-catching photograph, keep following this blog and our social media channels, because soon we will make a short tutorial on making improvements in Lightroom and finishing up in Photoshop. So once more, if you don’t need the photographs in jpeg right away, always shoot in RAW format.
In our blog we will regularly post photography tips and tricks that will help you improve the quality of your photographs. Today we start with tip #1. One of the most important rules that will help improve your photographs is very simple yet very often overlooked by many photographers : “shoot at the right time of day”.
This is my first post on the photoblog of Highdynamicranger.com, and there will be many more to follow. This is a shot of City Hall with tower bridge on the back. Shot on a tripod and post-proccesing done with Photomatix, Lightroom and Photoshop.
Last year in June, we were visiting London and I definitely wanted to photograph Tower Bridge and City Hall. I too a long bracketed exposure shot and managed to capture the evening lights. The sky wasn’t very interesting but I am still happy with this colorful photograph with two famous landmarks in London.
After running the pictures with Photomatix, I finished the final photograph with Photoshop and Lightroom. I hope you like the shot. I am always happy to hear your thoughts and comments.
