fun with HDR

This photo was taken at the Art Academy where I study Chinese. I’ve been curious about HDR and its painterly effects and I thought I’d test it out with my point and shoot. HDR stands for “high dynamic range” and it addresses the problem of cameras having too much or too little light in certain areas of a picture by layering several images (taken using different light settings) onto each other to bring out the most detail possible.

Since I don’t have a tripod, I just tried to stay as still as possible while taking several photos. I also edited this in Photoshop, and added a blue filter which I think looks kind of ugly.

Here’s a shot using just auto adjust (and no editing in Photoshop, just cropping) – notice how the trees outside are almost completely washed out.