Water Under the Bridge

Posted by Twelvebit (Victoria, United States) on 4 October 2007 in Cityscape & Urban.

I took about 60 photos in Austin one day last week and was largely disappointed with the results. I don't mean that I took 60 photos in the sense that there were 60 potentially good results. A good number of the frames I shot were bracketed exposures, some of which I intended to combine into an hdr image.

I'm a slow learner, but one thing this experience finally made clear to me is that there is very little tolerance for underexposure in the hdr process. If you expose for the highlights, and there are large areas of dark shadow as there are in this image under the bridge, applying the hdr process to a single exposure will yield completely unacceptable noise in the results --at least if there is any clipping in the shadows.

One alternative is to bracket. I tried this as well, but I didn't bring along my tripod. I've found that I can hand hold a bracketing of three exposures and generally get acceptable to good results when combining the images --IF the shutter speeds are all reasonably fast. In this case, given my aperture requirements, the deep shadows under the bridge drove the shutter speed too low for hand holding to be effective.

Unfortunately, it didn't occur to me to try my other alternative: flash. I had my new SB800 with me and it has a head that can be rotated to practically any position. How I wish I had experimented with this flash. Now I will have to make it a point to go back to this location and try it out.

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