What is a HDR image?

HDR stands for high dynamic range, which place in between the lightest and darkest contrasting parts of a photo. A HDR image is a final product composed of multiple shots that have used exposure bracketing to create a final product that pulls out the best colours in all of the images combined. You create a HDR image by using exposure bracketing. (as explained below)

When are HDR techniques used?

HDR is used when photographers are struggling to capture all the details and colours of a scene correctly so they use exposure bracketing, taking multiple photos using different exposure settings and then using technology to merge all the photos together making a HDR image. This creates the best result of all the shots pulled together, leaving a well saturated, balanced contrasting image.

Exposure Bracketing

Exposure bracketing is where the photographer will take multiple shots of the exact same scene altering the settings each time to get different exposures of the same image. This can also be done on the camera using settings so the camera will do it automatically. This means the photographer ether has many photos to pick from in the editing process or they can create a HDR image merge which will combine all the shots and create a best fit image for all of them.

How to Create a HDR image on Lightroom

Gather all shots in one row and selected them all using the shortcut, clicking on the first image then pressing CTRL and clicking the last image.

Once all the shots are selected you right click and select photo merge.

This option will come up before the images are fully merged allowing you to pick the amount of deghost for the final image.

It will allow you to see what and where the deghost effects as in this photo especially in each shot the waves were slightly different so if I changed through each deghost amount setting it would show the different details that changed. Once the deghost amount is selected press conform and then the image will create a HDR version.

Edit One

In this one you can see how it has increased the blue colour for the sea and brought back the clouds from being washed out but kept the rocks light enough to be seen and the details and tonal changes within them to be seen. Therefore creating an image much more similar to what I had seen when taking the photo.

Additional Editing

I felt this photo would benefit from further editing, using the adjustments tools and the brush tools, bringing out the sky and cliffs details in more depth.

Edit Two

For this edit, I started by using selecting two base images and then using the HDR photo merge.

This is my second edit, for this one I used the same process but I chose to use the high setting on the deghost as it helped produce more detail in waves and added the splash back onto the rocks. I worked out which bits the different settings of deghost changed by using the deghost over lay filter.

Final Photos

This technique was useful to learn and the exposure bracketing was a new technique I hadn’t tried before. I am very happy with the results, I was limited on the day as it was very bright and I didn’t have a lens hood, this meant a lot of my photos looked similar even when reducing/increasing the exposure. The results while being slightly unrealistic in terms of saturation it does follow the HDR style.

Romanticism

The beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque are three key concepts in aesthetics and philosophy of art.

Romanticism was an artistic, literary, musical and philosophical movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. It gained momentum as an artistic movement in France and Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century and flourished until mid-century. It was characterised by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of all the past and nature, preferring the medieval rather than the classical. It was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution. It incorporates a deep feeling of emotions such as apprehension, horror and terror, and awe. Romanticism was a huge step away from the subtleties of photography and instead looked very bold and striking. Romantic landscapes are typically “moody” in atmosphere; they are more about the subjective feelings of the artist, than an objective record of the observable world.

Romantic artists often sought to capture the moods, feelings, and emotions of their subjects, using expressive compositions, vivid colours, and dramatic contrasts of light and dark to do this. Photographers who also took up the romanticist approach aimed to sensationalise the overall look of their images by enhancing certain colours in order to make their images surreal, glorified and to dramatize certain areas of their photographs.

Romanticism first showed itself in landscape paintings, where British artists in the 1760s began to turn to wilder landscapes, storms, and gothic architecture.

The Sublime

The sublime is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation.

It is defined as a pleasure in the way that nature’s capacity to overwhelm our powers of perception and imagination is contained by and serves to vivify our powers of rational comprehension. It is a distinctive aesthetic experience. For Romantics, the sublime is a meeting of the subjective-internal (emotional) and the objective-external (natural world).

The sublime is closely associated with the Romantic movement, the concept of the sublime began to be employed by those who wished to challenge traditional systems of thought that were couched in the old language of religion, a rhetoric that now seemed founded on outdated conceptions of human experience. 

Edmund Burke noted that there were certain experiences which supply a kind of thrill or shudder of perverse pleasure, mixing fear and delight. He shifted the emphasis in discussions of the sublime towards experiences provoked by aspects of nature which due to their vastness or obscurity could not be considered beautiful, and indeed were likely to fill us with a degree of horror.

At one extreme was the sublime (awesome sights such as great mountains) at the other the beautiful, the most peaceful, even pretty sights. In between came the picturesque, views seen as being artistic but containing elements of wildness or irregularity. One of the earliest theorists of the picturesque, Uvedale Price, situated the picturesque between the serenely beautiful and the awe-inspiring sublime. A picturesque view contains a variety of elements, curious details, and interesting textures, conveyed in a palette of dark to light that brings these details to life.

Romanticism inspired photoshoot:

For this photoshoot, I went to different places around Jersey and photographed various different natural landscapes eg La Corbiere Lighthouse. I took my images in both portrait and landscape in order to get a variety of outcomes and make my images more interesting to look at instead of them all being in the same rotation. I think I successfully managed to capture the beauty of these places in my photographs through the bright colours and detail in each image. I enhanced the colours on photoshop using levels and curves. One improvement I would make for next time, is I would try and photograph some landscapes in other whether conditions as most of my images are sunny. But, if I photographed some in other whether conditions like fog or when its cloudy, I could enhance this feature in order to get more of a romanticised image as the scary whether conditions would provide that theme of fear in romantic images, given to the person who looks at my images.

Rural landscape photography is in many ways similar to photographing urban landscapes. The difference is rural photography is about capturing the “life” in the countryside. Rural landscapes include a variety of geological and geographic features such as: croplands, forests, deserts, swamps, grasslands, pastures, rivers and lakes.  This style of photography serves as a narrative, telling stories of places and lifestyles often overlooked in our fast-paced modern world. Unlike urban landscapes that often focus on the grandeur of architecture and the complexity of human-made structures, rural landscapes focus on the beauty of simplicity. 

Bucolic= a bucolic may be either a person who lives in the country (cf. rustic below) or a poem celebrating the pleasures of country life,

Pastoral= is the Eclogues of the Latin poet Virgil (70-19 BCE) are sometimes referred to as his Bucolics

What does landscape mean?

When did landscape emerge as a genre in western culture?

Although paintings from the earliest ancient and Classical periods included natural scenic elements, landscape as an independent genre did not emerge in the Western tradition until the Renaissance in the 16th century.

When did classical landscapes emerge as a genre?

In the 17th century the classical landscape was born. These landscapes were influenced by classical antiquity and sought to illustrate an ideal landscape recalling Arcadia, a legendary place in ancient Greece known for its quiet pastoral beauty. In the Netherlands, pure landscape painting was more quickly accepted, largely due to the repudiation of religious painting in Calvinist society. Many Dutch artists of the 17th century specialised in landscape painting, developing subtle techniques for realistically depicting light and weather. In a classical landscape the positioning of objects was contrived; every tree, rock, or animal was carefully placed to present a harmonious, balanced, and timeless mood. 

What prompted the rise of landscape art during the late 18/19th century?

Landscape painting eventually gained prominence in the late 18th century with the rise of Romanticism, and often continued to carry a religious significance. Additionally, it became a method of self-expression, with the emotions of the painter and their appreciation of nature demonstrated in the painting. The invention of the tin tube for paint (1841) and the invention of the portable collapsible easel (in the mid-19th century) revolutionised the landscape genre by allowing artists to venture out of the studio and study and paint their subjects first hand.

When did landscape photography originate?

the earliest known evidence of a landscape photograph was taken between the years of 1826 and 1827. It was an urban landscape photo taken by a French inventor by the name of Nicephore Niepce.