Sunrise, Sunset

No, not a song from “Fiddler on the Roof”

In an earlier posting, I mentioned that one of the reasons for purchasing a new camera was the ability to do high dynamic range (HDR) photography. I won’t cover the same ground as in the previous post.

Suffice it to say, that one area where the power of the eye and the weakness of cameras is obvious, is at sunrise and sunset. The eye can simultaneously cope with the brightness of the sun, while still rendering detail in the objects around.

Normal exposures find this challenging, either loosing detail in the sky while capturing it in the environment, or conversely the detail in the sky is rendered at the cost of a deeply shadowed rest of the scenery. Below is the normal exposure (of course this is highly dependent on the region that was selected for the exposure) for a sunset photo in Assen (NL) harbour, and the HDR processed photo (a composite of five exposures from +4 to -4 EV).

Standard Exposure (0 EV)

HDR Processed (+4 to -4 EV)

My memory of the scene is that it was very much like the HDR exposure both in detail and colour.