Take a good look at that picture (click on the picture title to see it bigger). I have made a quick experiment here and 7 out of 10 people thought this was HDR. If you thought the same, then I’m sorry to disappoint you. That is a straight-out-of-camera (SOOC) shot. Okay, I had to use Camera RAW to save it as a JPG, but apart from that, it is SOOC.
People spend too much time carrying and setting up tripods for getting thousands of different exposure shots to make a HDR frame and get the “perfect dynamic range”. Apart from some very specific artistic uses, making a lot of shots, merging them to HDR and tone mapping is a waste of time. Very similar effects can be reached with the right Photoshop skills in a way smaller amount of time and effort. Or, if you are lazy like me, you can get most of the effects you want in your photo right SOOC by simply tweaking your in-camera picture controls a bit.
First, any decent DSLR has fine-tuning picture controls. They let you control the amount of sharpness, saturation, brightness, contrast, etc. This is where you have to play around a bit to find that sweet spot.
For this picture in question, I turned Active D-Lighting on in my D90. This is Nikon’s implementation of Adaptive Dynamic Range, which identifies saturated highlight areas and try to correct them (read this article by Ken Rockwell for a detailed explanation on how it works). Because of this, I don’t need to mess around with Contrast and Brightness controls, as the camera does that for me. That’s how I got the perfectly balanced highlights and shadows on that photo.
The second step was to adjust saturation. Since this was a cloudy day will dull light, I decided to crank the Saturation controls all the way up. The immediate consequence of this is that the lawn gets much more colorful there, instead of a boring beige.
I also tweaked Sharpness a bit to make the Capitol’s details and trees crispier. And that’s it – cool shot SOOC. The amber color in the sky is from a half-81 color filter. The cool thing about the D90 is that I can save as many presets I want in my SD card, so I don’t have to configure this all the time. 🙂
Finally, if you like HDR, don’t get me wrong. I also like it and have a gallery dedicated to it here, but most of the time we can get away without it. Think about this and happy shooting!