.hdr (pt. I)

high dynamic range

I wrote an article years ago which was published in photography magazines in the Netherlands and Finland. It was well before the time when cameras would do in-camera HDR.
This was right around that time when everyone had Photoshop (Elements). They found the saturation function and started going all wild with cranking up the saturation until all details had disappeared. At the same time they’d yank the hue slider back and forth. The results were images of buildings or landscapes with neon green grass, neon yellow bricks and purple skies. And they would call it HDR.
A new trend was born.

High Dynamic Range (HDR) does not equal cross-processing

The article I wrote was about the differences between HDR and cross-processing. The latter being—basically—what all these people digitally did what I described above here. It’s a term stemming from the old film days, where developers (film developers, mind you)—intentionally or unintentionally—would screw up the chemicals with which the exposed photo paper was developed, creating funky colours and contrasts.
I have a number of images lined up from my “Cross-processing” series, so more about that later.

The images you see here, are HDR.
HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. It means that what you see in the picture must’ve been done with multiple pictures with bracketed exposures, because the range of light in the scene was too large to be captured on the sensor with one single exposure.
The left image is exposed for the background, the sunset. It underexposes the foreground, losing all detail there. The middle image is exposed for the foreground, overexposing the background, losing all detail there.
The right image, with a few minor colour adjustments, as you can see in the layers panel, is the result of the two images combined.

From a good HDR image you can’t really see that it’s been altered in photo-editing software (or in-camera, if you will).

We had this one printed on 65 × 100 cm kappa board. It’s hanging over our dinner table.