Photographing the sun using HDR.

The sun is incredibly bright; so bright in fact that including it in an image will likely wash out much of the image. Expose for the sun and everything else is a silhouette. Expose for everything else and the sun overpowers much of the scene. One of the best solutions I have found for this is using a technique called HDR.

HDR stands for high dynamic range. The dynamic range of any visual media is the number of stops between absolute black and absolute white. Many scanners only have a dynamic range of 4 or so while jpegs from a digital camera run around 8. A decent DSLR will give you a dynamic range of 12 when used in RAW mode. Although this represents the caputure of a huge range of light values, it is just not enough in some cases. Photographing an early morning scene with the sun in it where you want details in all areas is a good example. The fact is that even the best RAW capture will not have enough range to get it all. Enter HDR.

I have used HDR built into some cameras. I have noticed it is a common feature on cell phone cameas, and it is a feature on many other camera types. The problem is that it does not cover enough range, nor does it use enough images.

The HDR image in the above photo was taken by taking 7 photos, each a stop appart. I used the bracketing feature of my camera with 7 images each with a stop difference between them. Essentially the images were -3, -2, -1, 0, +1, +2, and +3. Since I shot them from my kayak I couldn't use a tripod (generally a recommended technique); instead I changed my drive mode to continuous high and shot all the images over a span of less than 1 second. Overall the result was satisfactory.

After I got home I imported the images into my computer and began the process of combining them into a single image. There are proprietary software such as Photomatix that does an excellent job at this; I this case I used Photoshop CS to achieve the coalescence. After some tweaking I found the settings I wanted and the results I hoped for. I was not disappointed.

An interesting concept is that I had manual exposure mode selected even though I used bracketing. The advantage of this is that I could pick my starting point independent of whatever the sensors were reading. By shooting at a lower exposure value than suggested I was able to get better images of the sun when the bracketing was finished. Aperture stayed the same while shutter speed varied. Not all cameras will do this, so try it out before committing.

Thanks for reading. Ericspix Eric Svendsen