H igh Dynamic Range
Shooting High Dynamic Range photographs can be useful when you need to balance extreme contrasts in a scene that are greater than your Nikon’s sensor can cope with
High Dynamic Range (HDR) photographs have something of a bad reputation, largely due to the unrealistic and ‘plastic’ results popular a few years ago. However, they can be really useful to handle high-contrast subjects, where the range of lighting is simply too great to be captured in a single frame.
You can either shoot the exposures manually or using Nikon’s Auto Exposure Bracketing (AEB) function, which allows you to shoot up to nine (but more typically three or five) shots at different exposures. You set the exposure difference between shots in increments between one-third of a stop to three stops (with a one-stop difference being the norm). If you use Continuous drive mode, you can take all of the requisite images in a single burst.
Make sure that you have at least one image that correctly exposes each of the extremes of the scene – highlights and shadow areas – as well as a number of steps in between them. The smaller these increments the more natural the final image will be.
You can handhold the camera and use Photoshop to align the images, but again you will get a more accurate result if you use a tripod, especially if you manually change the exposure settings yourself.
There are all sorts of software options for processing HDRS, but Adobe Lightroom will do a pretty good job, and give you a final HDR image saved in the generic DNG Raw format, so you can subsequently Raw-process the final image.
Processing the HDR image in Lightroom is simple: select the images and then select Photo> Photo Merge>hdr... If Auto Settings is selected, then Lightroom will apply some automatic corrections to the finished image, although as it is saved as DNG file, these suggested edits can be altered in the Develop Module.