New York Times reporter Roy Furchgott provides tips on High Dynamic Range photography techniques from Harold Davis on the New York Times Gadgetwise blog. The emphasis is on HDR that is subtle and looks realistic, rather than the garish HDR images that are all too common! I’m pleased that the article mentions my new book from Amphoto, Creating HDR Photos: The Complete Guide to High Dynamic Range Photography.

About the image: After giving a workshop, I spent a day relaxing in the hot spring baths at the Esalen community along the Big Sur coast of California. On the way back to my room from the baths I noticed a wonderful garden of small succulents. I wanted to create an image that showed all of the detail of the plant against a dark background. To accomplish my goals I shot seven exposures with my camera on my tripod using my 85mm macro lens. Each exposure was shot at an effective aperture of f/64 and ISO 200. The shutter speeds varied from 1/25 at the darkest end of a second to 4 seconds at the lightest end.

I combined the exposures using hand-HDR in Photoshop and Photoshop’s HDR Pro.