The new HDR book

I spent a good part of this year writing a new HDR tutorial book. We looked at the first book and threw out everything that was wrong. I was a different photographer when I wrote the 1st edition. I would HDR anything. After all that’s what the cool kids did. I don’t believe in that any more. In some ways I feel like this book is me trying to make up for the silly mistakes I made with the first.

These days I simply use HDR to extend the dynamic range of my camera. If I’m out and I don’t have filters then I’ll use HDR. There are also times when filters may not work all that well, so I’ll use HDR. What I won’t do is HDR a single RAW any more. I don’t believe in doing that. Lightroom and Photoshop have enough features in them to get all the detail I want from a single RAW, when I need it. I also don’t like the cliched HDR tone mapped look. So with this book I’ve tried my best to avoid it. HDR doesn’t have to be high contrast, richly saturated monsters. It can be simple and elegant if you want.

Almost every HDR in the book is from multiple exposures. There’s a lot of new photos in the book that have been produced for it. We try to show the original exposure out of the camera to demonstrate why we felt HDR was needed. After we try to show the tone mapped image from Photomatix before processing. This is important because people only ever see the final result. What they see is what they think HDR is. It’s not. It’s a process so we try to show that.

We’ve dumped the street photography and moved portraits to a smaller section of the book. This book focuses on landscapes, interiors, buildings, cityscapes, and other random little things. Below are some examples of the photography in the book. If you want to learn more you can buy it from Amazon USA now or Amazon UK soon.