HDR - Old School style

I was recently reading the reference book "Way Beyond Monochrome 2e: Advanced Techniques for Traditional Black & White Photography including digital negatives and hybrid printing" by Lambrecht and Woodhouse.

http://www.amazon.com …rds=way+beyond+​monochrome

It got me thinking about ways of controlling light, including dodging and burning. I decided to try an experiment with a traditional dodge/burn technique, only during image acquisition. The scene is a typical interior-exterior shot which often presents a high dynamic range. In this experiment, I also used DualISO to make my shadow tones with less noise.

The idea is to frame the shot with the very bright area in a contiguous patch in the image frame. I used a piece of cardboard to withhold light during the exposure until the very end - this way I have two exposure times captured in a single image.

The trick to all of this is to slow down the base exposure (for the mid and shadow tones) - draw this exposure out for a longer time, so you can have finer control over the short exposure (the highlights). To do this, I used a Lee Filters "Little Stopper" which is a 6stop neutral density filter.

For this scene, the base exposure was approximately 5 seconds. I held a piece of cardboard over the lens until the last 1.5 seconds of the exposure, moving the cardboard slightly during the first 3.5 seconds so that the edge of the masking area would not be apparent.

You can control the highlight exposure by revealing the highlight area sooner or later in the overall exposure.

I exposed the image in bulb mode.

fun stuff!

kirk

Gustave Le Gray was the proper old skool pioneer of a HDR back in the 1850s combining 2 images of the same scene
you can see the first ever HDR image here
http://www.unframedwor​ld.com …/what-is-hdr-photography/

i don't think i will be resorting to just a piece of cardboard any-time soon , fun as it might be
if it was not a good enough method for Gustave Le Gray back in the day , then its not good enough for me now

Nice work, Kirk. Very effective.

I read about this technique (minus the Little Stopper) back in my film days. Back then the cardboard would be used to block out the sky for part of the exposure. I remember just using my hand, moving it in and out of the frame to reduce some of the light hitting the film. You had to be quick about it to avoid leaving ghosts of your hand, though.

Yeah - like dodging and burning in the darkroom. Hey, whatever works! Just another experiment to think about. You need some sort of ND filter to get the exposure time to be long enough to separate the base exposure from the shielded exposure time.

This might be more useful in a situation where you have a naturally long exposure time - like shooting the sky with a city or lit scene near the bottom of the frame. You could restrict light from the city scene to keep the artificial lighting form blowing out the bottom of the frame while exposing the sky. Maybe a black glove would be useful in a pinch.

It's all about compressing the dynamic range of the scene, in this case in camera.

kirk

really interesting read, thanks for the link!