I’ve been taking HDR pictures for about a year and a half now, since mid 2008.

I heard about this technique where you could merge several exposures to compensate for the lack of dynamic range of digital sensors. Being a geek I found this interesting and searched the web for more information. I came across Trey Ratcliff’s Portfolio. He also produces StuckInCustoms a photoblog that has new pictures daily. The pictures on his sites blew my mind. I’d never seen photos look like this before. They were so real; so beautiful and so evocative.

I had to have some of this.

It was obvious that Trey was a talented photographer, regardless of the HDR processing. I knew I would not be able to take photos that came close to his, but I thought I should be able to process pictures as well as him; being a (world class) geek has it’s advantages.

So I started by reading the StuckInCustoms HDR Tutorial, which I recommend to anyone. I learned about bracketing, Photmatix and much more. Soon afterwards I had downloaded the free trial of Photomatix and was taking some test shots to process.

At the time I had a “SuperZoom” Panasonic Lumix camera. This had the facility to auto-bracket. I thought it was a pretty good camera (at the time). But it soon became apparent that although I could learn the processing fairly easily, the art of taking good pictures was quite tricky.

I started looking around the web for tips on how to improve your photography. Composition was a key thing I learned about, something I’d all but ignored in the past.

One of my first photo expiditions was to my local park. This picture of the pond is one of the first HDR shots that I considered good enough to show people.

Pond in Pukekohe (Click for full size)

The seagulls were kind enough to sit still for the whole 3 exposures. (By the way, this is what mid winter looks like in New Zealand, or at least where I live, which is just south of Auckland in the north island)

Also around this time I went to a friend’s bithday outing. We went to a Gun Club to have some fun shooting clay pigeons. This was in fact a lot of fun, firing real shotguns and even managing to hit some targets.

At the end of this the sun was going down so I whipped out the camera, still my Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ20, and tripod, and took some pictures of the setting sun.

Gunclub Carpark (Click for full size)

Now although this was not a great shot, it did have some of the “evocative” quality that I was seeking. For instance, the way the orange of the sunset fades into the misty treeline. Or the way you can almost feel the crunchy-ness of the carpark gravel.

This was going to be fun; learning to produce good HDRs.

It was time to get a proper camera…