The human eye is about an order of magnitude more sensitive to light’s dynamic range — the difference between dark and light — than our cameras. Luckily, we’ve invented Photoshop.

High Dynamic Range (HDR) photos are composites of the same shot taken at different exposures. The lights end up lighter, the darks darker, and the colors richer.

More discussion of cameras, HDR, and my first experiment therewith after the jump.

I’ve been shooting with the gallery’s Olympus FE-240. It has a scene mode called “Auction” which, for reasons I’m not clear on, takes three 640×480 frames at three exposures: -0.3 EV, metered (0) EV, and +0.3 EV. This is the closest thing the camera has to a continuous shooting mode and it’s strangely good for HDR shots (maybe Olympus means for all your eBay stills to be HDR).

The trick with high dynamic range photography is that the images need to be basically identical. There’s some software correction for this, but the closer you get to exact the better: a tripod, or similar, is essential. I’ve been setting up a shot, setting the camera to -2.0 EV, getting three exposures using Auction mode, then doing the same with metered EV and +2.0 EV, giving me nine images from -2.3 EV through +2.3 EV (Auction mode forces the camera outside its normally-accessible EV range).

I’m still playing, but here’s my first experiment — three exposures of the Ye Olde Victoria street lamp outside my bedroom window:

Here is the output of that “Merge to HDR…” command without any manual adjustments, then down-sampled from 32 bit to 8 bit using the same default exposure settings:

Hopefully that illustrates what I’m talking about. The differences aren’t as extreme as they are with some HDR images, but like the post title says: Experiment #1.