Editors' Picks: HDR Photography

Some A/M landscape pictures have very obvious halo.
I don't think it is a good idea having halo in landscape photos.

The best HDR work is the one you don't know it is made by HDR.

I joined this site a few months ago and have been very pleased with the quality of work and I'm learning more each day. When I signed up with the HDR Creme site a few weeks ago, I was hoping for the same level of expertise and constructive criticism that I've come to expect here.
Boy was I disappointed! The site states it's "The reference website for HDR Photography." What a crock. I've never seen such poorly processed, yet highly rated images. I've given my honest opinion on many photos at that site, pointing out how the images could be better, and it turns out that I'm some sort of an ogre, because I won't give a horribly over-processed image a 10 and now I've ruined its chances for being "Photo of the Day," or "Photo of the Week."
Yes, there are some very gifted photographers over there, but most of the shots are poorly lit and have very weak composition, but if the colors are bright and saturated, most everybody seems to love them. They aren't rating the photo's strength/weaknesses at all - just how groovy it looks in HDR.
So my point is this, I wish some of the folks over there would visit this site so they can see what truly good photography is all about. I was quite pleased to see an HDR edition of Editors' Picks. Now THIS is what HDR photography is all about. Subtle enhancements that appear natural.
Thanks again for providing an incredibly useful, resource-filled photography site.
Leslie Clement

I recently started shooting HDR, fell in love with it, and integrated the technique into my workflow. I asked myself "why am I only doing this now?" It was images like the ones above, that kept me from trying it.
It was images like Trey Ratcliff's that catalyzed my leap. His are among the best I've yet seen and obviously HDR.
Personally I was not drawn to high dynamic range photography for its capability to produce highly surreal photographs. I was simply fascinated by what it would do for me and my photographs.
The technique opened up a whole new world for me. A world where I got to explore the boundaries of light and colour in ways I didn't realize were possible. I soon noticed that I had begun seeing in HDR and my old ways had been transformed.
Now, there's no going back :)

I only see two ways to use HDR effectively: In a subtle way that naturally enhances a single-exposure image. Only the expert would recognize the HDR use. The second use is that of a creative graphic tool used to express a specific impression. This can be highly effective if done properly with the right image. Unfortunately, most HDR images, and many on this site, fall in between these two uses creating fake looking images without the creative graphic quality. The result is that this techinque will become stale very quickly.

The HDR in digital photography is for compensate the dynamic range to much the film, no for that fake crap..

When all else fails I turn to HDR. The best kind of HDR image is one that you don't notice. Personally I can not stand Grunge and too much local contrast enhancements.
It is a very useful process to produce monochromes as it produces fantastic tones, such as in Antonello C's photograph.

Thanks for compiling these examples. I have a question I'm hoping someone here can answer. The HDR process I understand requires a series of varying exposures of the scene, generally on tripod. However, some HDR images I've seen include people, animals or other objects, such as a boat on the water, which inherently tend to be in motion. Yet they're not blurry. (A good example is Ed's beautiful image above of Greg Norman in mid-swing.) How?
Thanks.

Lloyd,
I can't tell you how Ed achieved his shot, but I can tell you how I have done HDR when there are small waves hitting the shore while I'm photographing a bridge. The Photomatix software I use for combining the three images has settings for removing background or foreground movement. When one of these settings is selected the software will only use one of the three images for this portion of the combined image. The results are not always great but I am impressed with the results they give.

Photomatix does process a single RAW image as a HDR series so you can pretty much process any image as HDR.
You will always get best results with a series of three or more but for sports, wedding and other subjects which can't hang around waiting for multiple exposures this technique works fine. This is especially true if you are processing your HDR images for a more natural look...

I do feel old when I see the sloppy halos and the bland, weird, muddy colours and see that people like these shots. Normally I do not comment on them as I figured that I'm a fossil.
I do like the natural looking HDR images or the Exposure Fusion images, where the information from the bracketed images are used to control deep shadows and bright highlights. But that doesn't seem the object of HDR anymore; the aim seems to be the tonemapping process which, indeed, you can create from a single RAW file. It does make sense to me to call these 'tonemapped' images instead of putting them under the HDRI subject, IMO.