Commercial
Megapixels? No. We’re talking GIGApixels!
Thu Sep 25th - 1:48am
Unless plans change at the last second as they frequently do, this week's edition of the all-singing, all-dancing Ross-shire Journal will feature a panoramic view of Dingwall and the surrounding area taken from the top of the Macdonald Monument last Saturday during Doors Open Day.
At the time, that was the largest panorama I'd ever created, weighing in at around 53 megapixels. If you click the thumbnail to view the larger version then what you'll see is still only about 5% the resolution of the full version.
It took a fair bit of work to stitch that panorama together as it was created from a series of 17mm vertical frames, so there was considerable wide angle distortion. It's preferable to create panoramas from telephoto images, and that's exactly what I did for this next image which is a proof-of-concept for a much larger project. This image isn't meant to be of any great interest or artistic value, it's only an illustration of what can be achieved. This one is 137 megapixels but that's small compared to where the project is heading, which will be in the gigapixel range.
When you click through to the larger version of that one, what you'll be seeing is less than 2% the resolution of the full version.
Tain Vintage Car Rally
Wed May 28th - 10:20am
One of the highlights of the year is photographing the Tain Gala, and this year the gala committee is also organising a vintage car rally. So it was a very nice surprise to be asked to do a photograph for the cover of the car rally brochure.
The gala committee arranged for three vintage vehicles to be brought in to Tain high street one evening and we tried a few different ideas there, but eventually we went down to the links (park) and produced something a lot better:
Left to right in that photo are: Willie Ross with a Nuffield 10/60 tractor, Donnie Mackay with a BSA 650cc Thunderbold motorcycle, and George Sutherland with a 1921 Ford Model T Doctors Coupe that he rebuilt, starting with only the chassis.
iStock eyes your money
Thu Mar 20th - 2:09am
Each week since signing-up with iStockPhoto I've been receiving their e-mail tips, and I've noticed that they're becoming less focused on helpful advice and more focused on draining bank accounts. Well what a shock!
For instance, one e-mail offered a service for a "small fee" that will allow you to "re-download your carefully-crafted portfolio" in case you lose the originals of your uploaded images. The small fee ranges from $25 for less than 100 files to $75 for more than 500. Compare that to the wonderful, friendly, cuddly, fluffy Flickr, for example, where a $24.99 pro account gives you unlimited uploads and downloads. So iStock's prices are actually quite high, especially considering that they're already making money off your files.
And how about the e-mail recommending the Spyder monitor calibration system, which coincidentally iStock are now selling? Bizarrely for a product aimed at people who will be uploading files, iStock is offering it in a "special value bundle" which means you must also buy download credits. And how good is the offer? Well the Spyder3 Studio package, purchased from iStock, will set you back £383.56 which includes the obligatory £74.53 purchase of 115 download credits. But you can buy it elsewhere for £319.98 without having to buy iStock credits that you don't need.
(And incidentally, you'd be better off spending the money on a high-quality monitor and then calibrating just the gamma. Colour calibrators are a false economy, in my opinion, especially the high-priced suites with printer profilers.)
It won't come as any surprise that a microstock company would try to exploit its hard-working and under-paid contributors even more by offering them over-priced products and services and dressing them up as good value. The only surprise is that any photographers still want to join the iStock family, only to endure its special brand of domestic abuse in the hope of selling their valuable photos cheap.
No sunshine? No problem!
Thu Feb 28th - 12:40am
Photoshop is much maligned by some and much loved by others. I'm firmly in the latter category. Granted it doesn't (and shouldn't) have much use in editorial, but for commercial work it can make the difference between getting the job done on budget and not getting it done at all.
One extreme example that I've mentioned before was the high dynamic range portrait of a truck when a little bit of computer trickery enabled a stunning, colourful image to be created on a horrible, rainy and overcast day.
The photos that I'm posting today aren't quite that extreme, but they do illustrate one way in which you can use Photoshop to your advantage. I have a list of about a dozen photos that I need to do for an electrical contractor's web site, and of course we want the exterior photos to be bright and sunny. In February. In Scotland. The chances of this mythical day ever arriving are slim, and even if it does happen, the chances of getting all the photos done in one day are non-existent. But maybe Photoshop can help?
Take a moment to think about what a "bright sunny day photo" looks like. The key elements are: Blue sky, a fairly strong contrast between light and dark, and a subtle yellow hue.
When you break it down like that, you realise that Photoshop can do a lot for us here: If there's any blue at all in the sky then we can make it look as blue as we want it to. (But don't try to make an overcast sky look blue, it doesn't work!) If the sky isn't too overcast and the sun is low then we'll have contrast, and we can enhance it as much as we want. And that yellow hue? Obviously that's a 2-second job.
So with that in mind, rather than waiting for a bright sunny day that will probably never arrive, all we need is a day that isn't totally overcast, with a low sun. Those days come along much more often.
Photoshop might be commonly used to fix images that weren't done right in the first place, either by accident or lack of skill. But here we have an example of a situation in which you can deliberately take the 'wrong' photos, with the plan all along being to knock them into shape later on.
Without waffling on any further, here are four example photos. Note that none of them are bad photos as such, they just look a bit gloomy and wet, which is exactly what the weather was like.
And here are the finished versions. Notice how each of them sells the idea of it being a bright and sunny day, but in different ways. In this first one the deal makers are the little bit of blue sky and the enhanced yellow hue in the plants to frame left.
In this picture it's the yellow hue added to the grass, and those long shadows. The overcast sky was pushed as far as possible but the picture still works with it being a bit washed out, rather than the rich, vibrant blue that would be ideal.
Here it's the enhanced blue of the sky and the increased saturation of the brickwork. As I'm typing this I can see that more work needs to be done to bring out the red of the chimney, but as it is the photo still works.
This one was more heavily edited which is why the red of the chimney is better. Again it's the blue sky and saturated brickwork that sell the idea of the photo being taken on a much nicer day than it really was.
The point I'm making here isn't that Photoshop is good or bad, because that's an old argument and you've already made up your mind one way or the other.
No, the point is that IF you accept Photoshop as a part of your workflow, then learn to include it in the planning stage too. If you know what you can do to your photos on the computer then you know what you don't need to do in the camera. That's going to help you with scheduling, quotes and budgeting. You'll be able to take on jobs that you might have otherwise had to decline. You'll be able to complete existing jobs that have become unexpectedly difficult. And you'll have a nicer number at the bottom of your bank statement.
You may find that there are other advantages too. For example, look at those heavy gas cylinders in this house photo…
While preparing for the photo we moved a few bits and pieces and uprooted a large pole that obscured part of the house. But why waste time disconnecting the gas cylinders and moving them out of the way when Mr Photoshop can do it for you in a couple of minutes or less?
Portrait of a truck
Sun Jan 6th - 12:53pm
Seeing this image on a computer screen can't possibly do justice to how good the prints look, but here it is anyway. It's a high dynamic range portrait of a new truck done for the proud owner, Port Services of Invergordon.
The reason for using the HDR technique is, frankly, because the weather was horrible and I needed to do something to make the image pop. (I'm not exactly cheap so when I'm hired to do something, the client expects it to be done. Bad weather is no excuse.) Here's a single unedited exposure to prove the point:
It was raining quite heavily and the most time-consuming part of producing the final image was digitally removing the streaks of rain from the sky. And with four exposures used to make the HDR, there was four times as much rain! Took several hours. I dread to think how long it would have taken to remove the rain streaks from the truck, but if you view the large version then you'll see that I left them as I thought they looked nice how they were.
Must… not… HATE… microstock…
Thu Oct 4th - 12:12am
Thanks to Don Giannatti for pointing me to an article by an anonymous writer who describes himself as the photo editor for a national magazine, based in New York. It's a brief piece bemoaning the poor quality of microstock photography, with this heart-warming conclusion:
I’ve bought $1 stock before but the only reason I did it is I couldn’t find a similar photo at the other stock sources and I was told we absolutely had to have a photo to illustrate this very important part of the story.
If a better photo exists, I’ll buy it.
This was an eye-opener to me because as much as I dislike microstock companies for their attitude to photographers, I've been impressed by the quality of work that people produce for them. But here's someone who actually buys the images, telling us that he doesn't think they're very good and he'll pay more to get the quality he wants. So the proper stock industry isn't dead after all, big surprise.
Now, I've previously mentioned my flirtations and disappointment with microstock (here and here) so I wanted to post a quick update. I've actually sold an image! Whoopie doo! For unconnected reasons I was over at the Dreamstime web site yesterday and out of morbid curiosity I logged in to check my stats and saw that one photo had sold. This one earned me 50 cents…
To put that sale into perspective, a single usage of this next hospital image paid around $90 and I didn't have to jump through all the crazy, time-consuming microstock hoops with keywords and categorising.
You may recall that the second image was rejected by Dreamstime. So let's have a quick refresher of how this worked out:
- Accepted microstock image: $0.50
- Image rejected as microstock: $90
I'd say those figures demonstrate quite nicely that traditional image sales are still preferable to microstock sales. And it's good to know that someone rated your image highly enough to pay a proper fee for using it, rather than (perhaps) using it simply because it was the cheapest they could find.
But now I have a confession to make…
Maybe I'm just shallow and pathetic and money-hungry but seeing that $0.50 appear on my Dreamstime stats rekindled my interest in microstock. After all, I'd already written it off as a lost cause, but then 50 cents had materialised without me doing any extra work. It's not a terrible deal, is it?
So I decided to upload that violinist silhouette that I did the other day. Looks to me like exactly the sort of image that could sell well as stock. I did a quick edit to clean-up the background and make it one consistent colour, and here's the result:
You can guess where this is going already, can't you?
Rejected!
This one didn't even get as far as a human reviewer. It's the nature of the beast that a silhouette will have very little detail, so the file size is quite small. I uploaded it to Dreamstime and immediately an error message popped up saying that the file was too small — upload a bigger version or get lost, kiddo! I went back into Photoshop and re-created the JPEG at the highest possible quality setting, then tried re-uploading it to Dreamstime.
Rejected!
Oh how I love that little red 'X' in the corner of my browser window. It can save you so much frustration. I waved goodbye to Dreamstime and I dare say that will be the last I see of their finickety little upload screen.
Can you afford to shoot for microstock?
Sun Aug 26th - 9:09pm
There were mixed reactions to my comments about microstock agencies the other day so I thought it would be worth following up with some actual figures. Rather than debating whether or not my own photos were good enough to sell as microstock, let's look at the sort of money that's on the table for people who take the whole microstock thing more seriously.
Microstock News posted a response to my comments which offered the perspective from the other side of the fence. I started reading some of the news items on that site and this one from a couple of weeks ago offers an insight into what is considered a good deal for a microstock photographer:
Albumo is new microstock agency which offers photographers $25 if they upload 250 images. After they have uploaded 1000 Images, the photographers will join the Albumo's 100 program. This is a program where the photographer gets $0.10 for every approved image and in this way can earn max. $250. They also receive a higher commission. Some Photographers already reported to have received a payout. The Albumo's 100 program, as its name suggest, is only for the first 100 photographers who will accomplish to upload 1000 or more images.
For the sake of argument I'll suggest a best-case scenario for a photographer looking to take advantage of Albumo's juicy $25 deal. This is an absurd hypothetical, intended to illustrate how absurd the deal is.
Let's suppose you come up with a concept that will somehow allow you to design, plan and execute all 250 photos in one day. Let's say your working day is a casual 8 hours. Let's say that all of your photos are accepted. You don't have any staff to pay, no equipment to hire, no studio rental, nothing. It's all profit.
Congratulations, you just got a job that pays $3 per hour.
(Many photographers would charge around $1 per minute for the sort of high-concept work you microstockers are producing. And we get to work with nice clients who actually appreciate our efforts! Don't under-estimate the value of job satisfaction. Do you feel good about selling your work through microstock or is money the one and only reward?)
Now let's imagine you're one of the 100 'elite' microstockers that makes it into Albumo's esteemed "100 program". We'll stick with the same crazy hypothetical that you can produce 250 photos in one day, so it will have taken you four days to produce the 1,000 photos that Albumo wants. But you get $0.10 per photo! So with that first $25 and then $0.10 per photo you'll have a whopping $125 in the bank.
Congratulations, you got a raise. You're now on $4 per hour.
(Any regular photographer doing a 4-day job is likely to be charging $400+ per day. The ones doing-high concept work — for proper clients, not microstock agencies — will be on $300+ per hour.)
So that gives us a rough idea of what microstock agencies consider a good deal. They'll pay you $4 per hour for a job lasting four days. But that's with everything working in your favour. The reality is that you'll spend weeks if not months producing those 1,000 images. Take two months, working 8 hours every single day, and you're down to $0.30 per hour. What a deal eh?!
But of course there's something we haven't considered so far: Sales. The figures we've looked at so far have been one agency's special introductory offer. What about all the money you'll make from selling those 1,000 images at whatever tiny per-image value the agency places on them?
Konstantin Sutyagin gives us an insight into the sort of money that the best microstockers can make. According to his comment on Flickr he made $928.20 last month from one agency (Shutterstock) with a portfolio of 500 images.
Let's cut straight to the chase and acknowledge that this could theoretically be a good income. If Konstantin were to make that amount every month from all seven agencies that he sells his images through then he'd make $77,968.80 per year.
Not taking tax into account, that's $156 per photo!
But how realistic is it that you'll achieve that level of success? You need to ask yourself several questions:
- Are you as good as Konstantin? Not just technically, but conceptually. Microstock is all about creating eye-catching generic images that will sell, sell, sell. Konstantin will have images in his portfolio that could fit equally well into a village newsletter, a flyer for a concert, an IT manager's budget proposal and a holiday brochure. Can you conceive an image that is so versatile? Can you do it 500 times?
- Will you sell as many images through every agency? (Probably not. More on this in a moment…)
- Can you do it for free? You might need to hire equipment, locations or props. Maybe you'll need to pay models, assistants or make-up artists. Don't forget travel expenses.
- What about rejections? One frequent criticism of microstock agencies is the seemingly random nature of which images are accepted and which are rejected. Will you have a 100% hit rate? 90%? 25%?
- Can you produce another 500 equally good images once the sales on the first batch start to dry up?
The key point here is how many images you'll sell. Using our guesswork figures, Konstantin will only make his $77,968.80 per year if he sells around 780,000 images per year at $0.10 each. (And for each of those $0.10 sales the agency will be making around ten times as much.) But let's go crazy again! Let's suppose you were to get a full $1 for every image you sell. Now you only need to sell 78,000 images per year. Is that feasible?
We can get some idea about this from a news item on Black Star Rising which reports on the so-called success story of Erik Reis. Since getting into the wonderful world of microstock "in 2005" (no month given) Erik has sold around 35,000 images through 12 agencies. Seeing as we don't know when in 2005 he started we'll go for the best-case scenario again and assume that it was December, so to date Erik has sold 35,000 images in around 20 months, or around 21,000 per year. That's less than a third of the figure for Konstantin's hypothetical income.
And whereas Konstantin has a portfolio of 500 images, Erik has over 1,300.
According to Black Star Rising, Erik's average cut of a sale is $0.50. Selling 21,000 images per year gives him an annual income of $10,500. That's $8 per image, around 1/3 the selling price of a single 8"x10" print. There are high school football photographers making $10,000+ in a couple of weekends.
It's your call…
You may wonder why someone who doesn't do microstock would care enough about the subject to write about it twice in one week. And some people will assume that it's because I don't like microstockers devaluing photography, making it harder for me to make a living.
That isn't even close to the truth. Personally I have no interest in producing stock images. I do photos for a couple of local papers, portraits, weddings, parties, and a small amount of commercial work. That's what I like doing, that's where I earn my living, and I'm happy. Microstock is not affecting my income in any way.
But I disapprove of microstock because the agencies are exploitative:
- They require you to invest time, effort and quite possibly money into producing an image, and when you send them the finished product with all of the necessary descriptions and keywords they might accept it. If they reject it then you've lost money. If they accept it then it costs them nothing and you've still lost money.
- They don't earn their cut. For the most part microstock isn't advertised. Agencies rely on potential customers visiting their web site, searching for an image, finding it and paying for it. Then the agency takes a 90% cut. Like any business, microstock agencies will pay the absolute minimum that they think they can get away with. Paying you 10% of the selling price for your own work shows how little respect these agencies have for you. (And who can blame them? After all, you're willing to sell at that price, aren't you?)
- They act like it's a good deal.
Financially it doesn't matter to me if people sell their souls to microstock. It's a personal thing. I just want to add to the growing number of voices who are trying to persuade people to invest their talents elsewhere.
You need to be good to make money through microstock. If you're good enough to shoot for microstock then you're good enough to work in other areas of photography where you'll have more job satisfaction and a higher income.
And the rest of us won't think you're a mug.
To microstock and back in two days
Fri Aug 24th - 2:56am
Microstocks… ask a thousand photogs what they think of them and chances are you'll get a thousand different answers.
At one end of the scale are the people who think microstock is a great way to get into shooting stock images without all the hassles of marketing. Conversely there are those who say that microstock is killing the pro end of the market by devaluing stock images to bargain bin level.
The reality for most photogs is somewhere in the middle: Microstock sites are a place to dump your low-value images and if they sell then you make some money, if not then it doesn't matter because you weren't doing anything with them anyway.
I was firmly in the "devaluing the market" category. But a recent discussion in the Strobist group on Flickr inspired me to experiment with microstock. I shoot a lot of experimental images that I'm never going to even try to market, so why not make some easy $$$ in the no-risk world of microstock?
I'll admit that I was never intending to get seriously into this. I decided to join three microstock sites and commit one hour per day maximum for a week or so, then write about the experience here as a kind of 'review' for anyone considering microstock as an option. My starting images would be the library images of Raigmore Hospital, the dark key holly images and the pictures of dying roses.
The microstock sites I decided to trial were Dreamstime, Shutterstock and iStockPhoto, the three I'd already heard of and supposedly the market leaders.
It soon became evident that my one-hour-per-day rule was going to be a problem. On the first day it took over two hours just to upload the 20 images to Dreamstime, including writing descriptions of every image, selecting which categories to put them in, and deciding on a minimum of 10 keywords. I later found out that part of this process can be automated, but the automation was slow and it's probably faster to do all of the images one at a time. All images on Dreamstime must be approved by a photo editor and a message advised me that this was likely to take around 20 hours, which I suppose is fair enough.
The two hours that Dreamstime sucked up meant that I'd already used my allotted hour for the next day, so I didn't do anything with Shutterstock or iStockPhoto. All I did that day was check the control panel on Dreamstime and note that we were rolling around to 30+ hours with all images still pending review.
My experiment with microstock ended the next day…
After a full day longer than the 20-hours estimate I received a flood of e-mails from Dreamstime notifying me of which images has been accepted and which had been rejected. Nine had been accepted and 11 rejected, mostly the Raigmore images. Now that's a kick in the ego/pride but we all know that rejection is part of this business, and the way to deal with it is to learn from it.
Fortunately, Dreamstime are courteous enough to give a reason for each and every rejection. Unfortunately some of their reasons are silly, with a variety of notes about the Raigmore images citing "poor lighting setup, poor contrast or incorrect exposure". Now I'm well aware of my abilities and I know that I'm still running just to catch up with Ansel's shadow, but I can expose an image just fine, thank you. I'd guess that Dreamstime's photo editors are looking for the sort of ultra-bright, ultra-contrasty, ultra-saturated images that adorn the pages of business reports and marketing brochures, but that's no reason to reject editorial stock as being badly exposed. Exposure is exposure, if it's true then it's right.
These images were highlighted as being badly exposed:
Note that all three are correctly exposed but they all have either a lot of dark tones or a lot of light tones. This makes me wonder if they are being 'reviewed' by a computer algorithm rather than a human?
Bizarrely a lot of the Raigmore images also had notes about copyright and trademark infringement. Yes, a couple did include logos that I'd forgotten were off-limits for stock images, so that's my fault. But others appear to have been rejected for reasons that seem absurd to me. Here are three examples:
So was that first one rejected because of the posters on the noticeboard? Was the second one rejected because the stained glass window design might be copyrighted? Presumably the third one was rejected because you can see the manufacturer's logo on the front of the ambulance?
All of that aside, though, one thing in particular made me realise that microstock really isn't for me. This next image was another that was rejected due to an unspecified copyright / trademark issue. But on the day that Dreamstime rejected it from their low-paying microstock catalogue, the BBC used it in a news story. So in one usage as a good old-fashioned news image it earned more than it was ever likely to earn as microstock.
Clearly there is a place in this world for microstock services. But let's go back to that original discussion on Flickr and consider the work of the person who started it, Konstantin Sutyagin. He's making good money from microstock, but look at the quality of his work: He's right up there with the best of them. There are people producing much lower quality work who are making much more money through the traditional client / photographer relationship. There are people on that side of the business turning seven figures annual, and many more turning at least six, and I can see no reason why Konstantin can't move into that earning bracket.
For me, no, commercial stock photography holds little interest. I'm a wannabe news photographer, that's why I got into the business and it's all I want to do. But for someone like Konstantin who has oodles of creativity and talent and is willing to invest a lot of time in filing images with microstock sites, I think he'd be well-advised to invest 10% of that time in career building and then enjoy cashing the cheques for 1,000% of what he's making from microstock.
Dump your worthless images into microstock. Don't invest a lot of time in it. If they sell then they sell, if they don't then you haven't lost much. But if you take microstock any more seriously than that then you'll be wasting time, resources and valuable images on a gamble that will make someone very rich: The people who own the microstock sites.
Bottom line: Microstock is a number's game. You won't win. Whatever money you make from microstock, you could make a lot more elsewhere.
Follow-up article: Can you afford to shoot for microstock?
Golf prize-giving with backdrop
Sun Aug 5th - 6:01pm
I've photographed several golf tournaments at Tain Golf Club and I usually hang around afterwards to do pictures of the prize-giving ceremony on my own time, just for completeness. Those pics are generally quite poor due to cluttered backgrounds with lots of light fittings, windows and pictures on the walls.
Yesterday I was there specifically to photograph the prize-giving for the sponsor, Balblair Distillery. So we decided to get the job done right and set-up a backdrop. And I wanted to shoot f/8 @ ISO 100 so I set-up a studio strobe with a 100cm softbox. This set-up was still not ideal as I didn't have a lot of room to work in, so I had to shoot around 70mm and I couldn't use either a fill light or a hair-light. But it was the best of limited options.
As always it's good to plan for all eventualities and I would have put money on the club committee wanting a group shot with the sponsor. So I used a full 3m wide backdrop and lit the full stretch. And sure enough…
Here's a shot from a previous prize-giving at this location. This shows pretty much the whole area available for doing the photos. As you can see it's not a case of having to find a clean background, it's a case of there simply not being any clean backgrounds available. And that's not even taking into account the number of people standing around.
Yesterday's shoot went perfectly with one exception: I'm too polite! The photos were done at one end of the bar and we'd cleared away a few tables so I could set-up the strobe to frame right. I needed to keep the lighting angle fairly sharp in case anyone was wearing glasses. Just as I was getting the strobe set-up a couple came over and asked if they could move a table into the place that I had reserved for the strobe. Well of course I didn't just say yes, I actually went and got the table and chairs for them! What an idiot I am sometimes.
So anyway I then had to put the strobe to frame left, quite close to me, producing some nasty reflections in people's glasses. Took a couple of hours to remove the reflections in Photoshop.
In all seriousness, though, I think this was the right way to handle the situation. When you're working for someone you are effectively representing them, so you need to conduct yourself as if you were any other employee. So if someone asks you to do something then the answer is yes and you need to work around any problems you create for yourself. It's, uh… par for the course. 
Holiday home interiors and exteriors
Thu Jul 5th - 6:21pm
Architectural photography is quickly becoming my favourite work. I still don't really enjoy the process of setting up and taking the photos, but as I get better at it I am starting to find it less of a chore. What I really like, though, is the satisfaction of doing something that I find very difficult and then producing quality photos.
This first pic is a good example of how tastes can differ in this style of photo. The rug wasn't there when I arrived but the client suggested putting it there. When he saw the picture his first reaction was that we should have used a second rug and put something on the table. On the other hand, I'd have preferred to do it without the rug at all. Some people like houses to look "lived in" whereas I prefer the photos to be very stark and empty. Both opinions are equally valid but we've decided to work in my preferred style and I'll be re-shooting this pic without the rug. (Plus I'll close the window this time!)
One of the biggest challenges is avoiding an optical illusion that causes pictures to appear off-angle. In the vertical shot of the kitchen, every vertical is truly vertical but does the picture look slightly clockwise rotated to you?
Sometimes it's impossible to take the photo you want to take. For the exterior pictures of this other house it was essential to show the long garden with several attractive features, but I couldn't find a way to do that without showing something off to one side of the house. Eventually I settled on showing the house next door, but shot from a low angle to cover it with the trees as much as possible. The closer view is a much nicer picture, I think, but the one with the garden had to be done even if it lacked something artistically.
And this is my first HDR shot. High Dynamic Range is a technique that has been around in principle for ages, but its usage is only now becoming common in photography. In brief, you take multiple pictures at different exposures and then merge them together to capture the full range of shadows and highlights, with the added bonus of reducing ISO noise in your shadow areas. This picture was a blend of seven exposures at 1-stop intervals.
HDR isn't always the right choice. I did an HDR shot of the close-up exterior and due to movement it produced a horrible streaking pattern in the clouds and some nasty ghosting around the leaves. I also did an HDR of the other living room and the results were inferior to a single good exposure. But it's a good technique for some pictures and it worked brilliantly for this one.
Here are the seven frames used for the exposure. Obviously these are just the raw frames, once they'd been merged to an HDR that file was then processed and perspective corrected etc.
