Kevin Crafts dot com

This summer I was asked to take part in an exhibition of the Norlin Library on the University of Colorado at Boulder campus. After discovering other photos I had taken of the campus I spent a few days taking new shots for the exhibition which is on display in the library’s new learning commons.

You can browse through most of the photos below, or if you want to hear me talk about my photos I’ll be part of a panel discussion on Tuesday, September 22. More info on the discussion can be found on the CU-Boulder Events Calendar.

Below are 25 examples of great HDR photography. HDR has its critics but these photos show the processing doesn’t have to be over the top.

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After some questions asking how I process my hdr photos, particularly the bus photos, I decided to put together this small tutorial.

The software used to complete this tutorial is Photomatix 3.0 and Photoshop CS.

Step 1: Shooting the photos

When shooting photos for an hdr process I set my camera (Canon 30D) to the fastest frame rate possible (5 FPS) and set the Auto Exposure Bracketing to the maximum amount of stops (2). I find that the fast frame rate will allow me to shoot handheld and then Photomatix can align the photos. I like using a wide angle lens and I my favorite lens for HDR is my Sigma 10-20mm.

I expose the photos so the darkest of the shots has the scene outside of the bus exposed correctly, since it’s darker inside the bus. I suppose I could shoot more exposures, but since I didn’t have a tripod, I just shot 3.

Here’s the 3 photos I ended up with:

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The WebUrbanist recently named me an “Inspiring HDR Photographer” in their article, 7 Inspiring Infrared and HDR Photographers. I’m not sure how to respond to that, except thank you and I’m happy to hear someone is inspired by my work.

There seems to be a constant debate regarding HDR photography – how much processing is too much?  Some believe that HDR processing should only be used to make the scene appear as it does naturally, while others will create images that don’t exist in the real world.  But what is natural? What is realistic?  It’s all about interpretation. 

Photographers interpret the scene to produce images they will be the most pleasing to the eye. 

How a scene is interpreted will determine how a photographer captures that scene.  By using varying focal lengths, shutter speeds, f-stops, films, lighting, perspective, point of view, etc, photographers can make a variety of different types of images from a single scene. These images may or may not be natural or realistic.

Producing unnatural or unrealistic images are not limited to post processing.

HDR tools have given photographers a new and creative way to interpret a scene. A photographer already has a number of in-camera settings and off-camera tools to make a photograph, HDR is just another tool in the photographers bag of tricks.