High Dynamic Range Photography
This article is much better than the usual run of NYT articles about photographic technology. Most often it's impossible to escape from one of these articles without hearing that "digital produces better pictures" or "film will soon only be available to Civil-War reenactors" (note to self: avoid all hobbies that require me to reenact anything). I do think this article omits a fairly critical point. It talks about how some people feel H.D.R. produces images that look unnatural, and ends by quoting a maker of H.D.R. software discussing the point:
Géraldine Joffre, the managing director of HDRSoft, said that while Photomatix was popular with amateur photographers, some professionals told the company they found its results unnatural.(Speaking of images that look like creepy bad paintings, Ms. Joffre had no comment on how or why Thomas Kinkade manages to churn out such heinous crap without the shame that would prevent you or me from doing so even if we lacked talent to his extent. Hmm, who knew that in addition to his other derivative tendencies Kinkade has also taken a page from Al Hirschfeld's book?)
But Ms. Joffre's theory is that the pros' assessments are based on photography's traditional limitations—in effect, how people think photos should look, rather than the actual dynamic range of scenes.
"People sometimes say it doesn't look like a photograph, it looks like a painting," Ms. Joffre said. "But if your camera was perfect it would take an H.D.R. image."
But anyway, the point that both the author and Ms. Joffre miss connects back to my use of the word "represented." Because while it's certainly possible for a computer image file to hold data with the full dynamic range of our vision (and beyond), no available display medium has the full dynamic range of our vision. So the H.D.R. images still look unnatural when printed on paper, or projected, or displayed on the computer screen.
It's also worth noting that many, many photographic subjects don't strain the limits of dynamic range. My guess is that even if I could capture really contrasty scenes, I would mostly opt not to, for various reasons. And, of course, these H.D.R. techniques only work well if nothing moves from shot to shot.
There is definitely room for these image processing techniques in the creation of art, but it requries a subtle hand. As I recall, Seattle's own lawyer-turned-fine-art-photographer Chris Jordan combines multiple scanned transparencies to create some of his images, but the results are never less than totally real looking. A deliberate unnatural quality can be a critical part of the artistic impression, as in the work of Gregory Crewdson, which is about as far removed from ordinary snapshots as you can imagine.
posted at 12:25 AM
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