Dustin Barbour

I’ve done a lot of reading about HDR photography in the past and have always wanted to see what I could do using the technique. The only problem was that I hadn’t owned a tripod (pretty much mandatory for this sort of work) until yesterday. So today I took off on something of a sight-seeing tour of northern Mississippi. I took a lot of pictures, but most didn’t turn out nearly as I had intended. Consequently, I’m only sharing the four above. The first image was taken along US-45, the highway that runs through Columbus on down to Meridian, MS and then to the coast. The other three were taken on the west bank of the Stennis Lock and Dam just west of Columbus.

Per Wikipedia:

High dynamic range imaging (HDRI or just HDR) is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of luminances between light and dark areas of a scene than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention of HDRI is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to shadows.

Next weekend I plan on hitting the Natchez Trace Parkway, a road identified as one of the most scenic in the country, to do some more photography. We’ll see how that turns out. Some of the pictures presented here were processed more than others, but each represents my memory of the scene pretty well. My favorite is the third one. Which one is yours? Do you have an opinion of the HDR technique?

Update:
I realize that my truck can look fake in these HDR pictures. So, as an exercise, I started playing with Photoshop a bit more and ended up with the following pictures. The first is a shot of my truck in a field of small yellow flowers… obviously. I think the truck looks far more realistic. This was accomplished in Photoshop with a layer mask and one of the original images underneath. I think I still prefer the more drastic images of my truck, though. The second is another shot of the lock. I thought this one looked great with the more extreme saturation and contrast. It doesn’t look at all “real,” but I like it.