Thetis Lake near Victoria - using HDR

Thetis Lake from the North side.
We had the good fortune to travel to "The Island" (the term us mainlanders use for Vancouver Island) a week or so before things with Covid-19 started to get out of hand.  We enjoyed terrific visits with people we don't see very often and had good weather on top of that.  On the way to our province's capital we stopped at a number of parks.  The photo above was done at Thetis Park; a gem located about 10 km from Victoria just off Highway 1.

I used a technique called HDR, which stands for High Dynamic Range.  Some cameras have a built in HDR feature, but it has never really been a big draw for me.  I would much rather do it on my own.  The reason is simple enough.  I have never found a camera which does it well.

Dynamic range is the distance, measured in stops, between black and white on an exposure.  To be clear, it is the tonal range between the amount of light needed to produce a totally black exposure and the amount of light needed to make a totally white exposure.  Most scanners have a DR of about 4 stops, which isn't much.  JPEGs typically represent about 8 stops.  On very bright, sunny days where harsh shadows are produced there can be as much as 15 stops between light and dark values.

In order to capture the details in the dark areas I took 5 photos of the scene in a process called bracketing.  Essentially this is taking the photo as you normally would, then taking others letting in more and less light than the camera is telling you.  Five different exposures, one stop difference between each consecutive one.

The rest had to happen back at home using a program that could merge the images.  I have used Photomatic successfully before but wanted to try my Merge to HDR Pro setting in Photoshop.  I never cared for this function in Photoshop CS but the new CC seems to handle it well.  After the process was over I tweaked the image and obtained the result you see above. 

Thanks for reading.   www.ericspix.com   Eric Svendsen

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