How many times have you looked at a landscape photograph and thought “that looks almost unreal� Or “how come my photographs never look like that?� Well the chances are that the images you are looking at have been created using a technique called High Dynamic Range (HDR).

A quick flick through last years successful entries in the Landscape Photographer of the Year Competition – Take a View reveals that it is a technique which is fast becoming commonplace in landscape photography, but what is it and how does it make the images look so amazing?

All cameras have a limit to the range of light intensities that they can record (the dynamic range) and this means that if there is something very bright in the picture (e.g. the sun!) then if you expose the image for this object the rest of the image will be a lot darker – think about your own photographs where the shadows always look a lot darker than they seemed to be at the time. Conversely if you expose for a shadow area, then areas that were a lot lighter than this will be burnt out white. This problem is actually a lot worse since the advent of digital photography, as colour film used to have a very high dynamic range anyway (in fact it still does if you are one of the rare people who still use it!).

What HDR does is to combine several images (usually 3 or 5) taken at different exposures so that there is detail in both the shadows and highlights of an image regardless of the extreme lighting conditions that may have been present when the image was captured.

So isn’t this cheating? Well no not really, because your eyes are so quick at adjusting to light intensities that a well-created HDR image can look much more like the scene you would see if you were there than the single digital image most cameras would capture. However, like all techniques it is a bit overused and some images can look very unrealistic and cartoon-like in character if not handled properly (here are a some examples I’ll let you decide which ones used the technique well, although here’s an example that I really don’t like).

Do I use it? Not yet (hence no image on this blog article!)….at the moment HDR doesn’t really suit the style of images I produce but I wouldn’t rule anything out as I’m quite happy to take advantage of other Photoshop tools to achieve the image I am looking for.

So look carefully at the next stunning landscape image you see….is it HDR?