International HDR day… with your Sony NEX

Tomorrow, Saturday 26th June, is International HDR Day!

As I’ve said before, I’m not a huge fan of the overcooked HDR style which either removes all shadows from the image or makes the sky so unnaturally dark that the ground appears to be the light source! However, I’m getting ahead of myself.

HDR what now?

Underexposed castleOverexposed skyHigh Dynamic Range (HDR) is a technique for photographing scenes which have both deep shadows and bright areas. I was recently shooting a castle in the west of Ireland and I had the lovely sunset colours in the distant horizon, which unfortunately meant that the building itself was in shadow. A photograph which had the castle exposed correctly meant the sky was overexposed; and if the sky was correct, the castle was massively underexposed, almost a silhouette. 

The HDR solution to this problem is to take a series of images at different exposures and combine the best bits of each. This normally requires separate software but, as I’ll show you, the NEX has everything you need built right in.

A series of images at different exposures

The final HDR image balances the brightness of the sky and the shadows of the house (without being too lurid): The final HDR image balancing the castle and sky

HDR on your NEX

 The great news is that the Sony NEX have HDR functionality built-in to the cameras. All you need to do is activate the “AutoHDR” mode and the camera will take 3 frames at different exposures and automatically combine the results into a single HDR photo. I’ve put together this brief screencast showing how to switch to the HDR mode:

Example HDR images from the NEX

Here’s a quick example from my garden. The garden itself is in deep shadow but the fields in the background are being brightly lit by the low sun and the sky is a bright pale blue. Under normal circumstances, the sky gets very overexposed and the garden is a little too dark…

 Normal exposure mode: overexposed sky, underexposed garden

But the HDR version compiled by the NEX retains details shadow detail without losing colour in the bright sky…
HDR version, straight from the NEX: retains colour in the sky and detail in the garden

I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether you like the HDR “look” but it is very convenient having the functionality built into the NEX series of cameras!