I do not feel that HDR will overide or be consider any threat to all other styles of photography, like fashion some styles may be considered to be more “in season” than others.

Ultimately, it’s a different way to see the world and it’s always interesting to see the world from different perspectives and vision.

In the same manner, the shadowed part of a mountain only has definition when the eye is focused upon it and the iris gathers more light through dilation. I think HDR that is overly compensated will impress many people for a span of several years then will be looked upon as a passing fad. Of course a moderate amount of shadow to highlight exposure adjustment (“DR” without the “H”) has always been a part of making appealing photographs.

someone built a bridge called hdri. Maybe one day you will cross it the same way you crossed the digital bridge. Its ok to be afraid of the new. The artist makes work based on the culmination of experinces of his or her life without regaurd to the perfection of the masses. Some of us have been taking picture as a job for so long that you have forgotten the joy of exerimentation…

push your boundries to seek new limits and maybe the next bridge we cross is the one you built

The digital world has completely changed the way we make photographs. Photoshop is an amazing and essential tool. HDR is just one more unbelievable technological triumph in the advancement of photographic technique. Those old guys would have given anything to be able to experiment with the new technology if they had had it.

HDR helps create incredible images but it still all about composition. A great artist using HDR becomes a better artist. Technology enhances creativity and creativity enhances technology.

Wholly not true. We all see “reality” with zero interpretation that can be quantified based on known parameters and we have have this ability since the 1920′s. Look it up.

HDR in it’s purest form get’s us back to the original intent of visual communication, (art and information) prior to the advent of the narrow gamut required in color film based, originally in the 1860′s – now sensor based, RGB photography. If you don’t believe me, look at the painting, ‘The Last Supper “by DiVinci. The EV is the same throughout the painting, even though it shows interior and outdoor landscape, an impossibility in today’s photography without HDR. Wide gamut HDR, not taken to the extreme shows us what we all see in reality, not how color film or RGB/Bayer pattern image sensors see light. Our brains do not correct for exposure. That’s why we see the same value looking indoor to outdoor. We see an infinately wide gamut in reality. We’re just used to seeing the results of a narrow gamut captured on film, video with DSCs as a result of RGB sensors.

From a purely philosophical standpoint, it is high time we get back to the original intent of visual communication after being sidetracked by the film photography medium for 150 years. HDR will be embedded in capture devices, display devices and output devices soon, because it is human nature to see this “reality”, not to be constrained by 150 years of low-tech film based solutions. It is computational photography that will allow us to visually communicate again in a reality based medium. Hurry!

This comment kind of invalidates everything else Brian has said… because it suggests that good photography is objective and absolute, that there is only one way to achieve a good photograph (objective) and that there is such a thing as 100% perfection to strive for (absolute)… this is the case in all ‘practical technical skills’. If this is true then surely we would need objective proof that HDR makes a better photograph, something that cannot be proven. To the vast majority of it’s adherents photography is an art, and you only have to look at how different photographers approach the same scene differently

Logic aside, I don’t see a future where HDRI is automatically applied to all images, for two reasons:

Firstly, HDRI is a response to limited technology… image sensing and displaying equipment can’t match the range of brightness perceived by the human eye, and HDRI is a compensatory technique. I think rather than better technology leading to HDRI being performed in-camera, it will lead to sensors and displays that can handle a much wider range.

Secondly, when colour photography was invented, black and white wasn’t made obselete, and when automatic exposure metering was invented, photographers didn’t abandon manual mode and light meters and film is still used in preference to digital by many photographers. New technology in the arts always complements the old; for creative reasons many artists choose to continue without the new technology. I can’t see a situation ever arising where all photographers agree that there is no longer any point in having non HDRI images.

Finally, no photography is about capturing a scene as it really is. The human eye captures an image but the brain interprets it in a variety of different ways, all sight is tinged with a heavy dose of interpretation and an image of a scene as it actually appears would look unfamiliar to us, because our brains correct for exposure, white balance and recompose an image, altering perspective and highlighting important elements.

Sure, if after many years of shooting the same old commercial stuff, day in, day out, as a professional, you may become a bit less enthusiastic about photography, that’s not the same as looking at the ‘art’ from the perspective of an enthusiast or keen amateur, or indeed many active professionals.

Photography is reality, you state. Really? It may be subject to realism, when the subject demands, as in photo-journalism, or in architectural photography, where the ‘real’ image is paramount to the integrity of the subject or story, but how ‘real’ are the many millions of images posted every day on the internet?

Many of these have been processed by photoshop or other photo-editing software. Many will have been altered using the basic enhancements within the camera itself, and many more will simply have had a polariser, or warm-up, or UV filter, fitted to the lens to adjust yet another facet of the image. So how ‘real’ are these images?

In my humble opinion, all of these images have been altered in some aspect or other, but it doesn’t really matter, because they are ALL photo art, and in art, pretty much anything goes. There are some common phrases like ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, and ‘One man’s meat, is another man’s poison’. These are very relevant here, because there is no right or wrong with photography, because it IS an art, NOT merely a practical technical skill.

There is a school of thought that suggests we, here in Europe, having such a long cultured history, over the last thousand years or so, have developed an appreciation of the ‘old’ arts – painting, sculpting, drawing, etc, and find it difficult to appreciate the ‘new’ forms of art, like photography.

It is a completely different story across the ‘pond’, where the Americans celebrate the new arts as being every bit as precious and deserving of praise as the ‘classics’. Much of this is, of course, down to the sheer snobbery and elitism prevalent within the art world’s aristocracy. This is one of the reasons that photography will always play second fiddle to ‘mainstream art’ outside the America’s.

So, to sum up, long live HDR, and I welcome the next new thing to arrive to the infinitely expandable world of photography!!

Cheers,

Kenny