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I’ve been exploring my own images, looking again at work I thought was finished, converting works to HDR to try to better understand this new technology and what it means to my own photography.
HDR still photography—the “HDR” stands for “High Dynamic Range”—is a still image that takes advantage of the extended brightness levels of our modern screens, both computer screens and televisions. Surprisingly, in still photography, HDR is a new thing, though it has been commonplace in video for years.
One project I have revisited is my Owlscapes, a series of pictures of a family of Great-Horned Owls growing up in a tangled copse near my house.
The HDR versions look amazing and they make the non-HDR versions, which I shared a few posts back, look dull, a little lifeless. But here’s the thing: The prints of the same images, despite having a lower dynamic range than even the non-HDR images, look fine. They look great, in fact. And I bet that if I printed these images in a book using traditional CMYK printing, they would still look great, even though four-color printing has a smaller universe of color than an inkjet print.
More and more I see the screen image breaking free and becoming its own subfield of still photography, with printed images unharmed by this new development. Non-HDR images on a screen will, I suspect, become like pictures of paintings in books—nothing like the real thing, a photographic in-between state neither print nor screen, and lacking its own identity.
Next month, when Apple’s Safari browser and Messages begin to offer support for HDR images, I think we are going to see the quick adoption of HDR still imagery, but with many hobbyist photographers hesitating because for them the physical print will, for a time, remain the pinnacle of photographic perfection.
Until then, if you have a modern screen, even in a non-HDR Safari browser, you can see a few of my Owlscapes, revisited.
Because of the early state of this technology, not all browsers will display an HDR image properly. To make the examples work here, I’ve made two versions of each image–the first for Safari users and one that follows for Chrome and Opera users.
For Safari users:
For Opera and Chrome users:
