First experiment with HDR

This is completely unrelated to academic me, but I thought I’d show it off anyway. This is my first experiment with HDR photography, which stands for High Dynamic Range photography. It’s a technique that allows you to get a high level of detail in a large range of light intensities in one picture (all photographers can now clearly see that I’m a mere amateur, because I have a very vague notion of photo-vocab). Usually a camera only captures any significant level of detail in only a small part of the light-dark spectrum. So if you have a generally dark picture, the bright areas will tend to be over-exposed and visa versa. In HDR you take a series of pictures of the same subject (3 in this case) with different exposure times. So you get an underexposed copy (with details in the bright areas) a middle and an overexposed one (with details in the dark areas). Then you superimpose the three pictures and do a bit of fiddling (which all happens in a piece of software like Photomatix and is all complete black magic to me – I just pulled on some levers till it looked right) and voila! you’ve got yourself a pretty impressive piece of photography.

This picture (or rather these pictures, because it’s technically 3 of then) I took earlier today at Winchester Cathedral. This is the oldest Norman part of the cathedral that just instantly makes you see gloomy monks up on that gallery. Apparently, the gallery – the large one beneath the yellow-lit arch – once ran all the way around the cathedral and was used by the monks for processions. They pulled most of it down when they brought the cathedral up to more ‘modern’ Gothic standard. They had to remove it where they wanted to put in the higher pointed Gothic arches – which are stunning in their own way.

If you look closely, there is another smaller gallery visible at the top of the picture. This was used to close the shutters in those top windows before they were glased.