Sydney Night Panorama HDR

I’m trying to get in to doing more HDRI images now that I finally have a camera with auto-exposure bracketing. Having been in awe of this guy’s images for the past 12 months, I decided to give it a go after I discovered a set of stairs near my hotel with this amazing view of the city.

This is my first real serious foray into High Dynamic Range photography, so I’m still working through the ins-and-outs of how you go about it efficiently. The trouble with doing HDR panoramas, I’ve discovered, is the fact that you have to take 9 exposures (which at night range in times upwards of 20-30 seconds) and all 9 exposures have to be flawless. One exposure from a series of nine had moved on this shoot due to the fact that I’m using a very light tripod and there was a strong breeze, so I couldn’t use that mid-range series of exposures. So the above wider panorama image was constructed using the over and under-exposed images. While nice, there is still a lot of detail that we can’t see.

However, I was still able to use the three exposure version and crop out the offending frame which gives a lot more detail to the city as you can see. It provides a much softer and detailed image.

Another issue is the sheer amount of data that these images generate; ~20mb RAW files x 9, merged into 3 panoramas as 16bit TIFFs at about 8000×2000 pixels which are then merged into a 32bit HDR file which can then be put back out as as a 16 or 8 bit TIFF. So we’re looking at about 1gig of data that’s generated to get to the final photograph. Yes, I know I can delete some of the working files, but I’m a data hoarder…

The final issue – while not a particularly big issue, but still being an issue – is the processing time that a lot of this takes. It is very processor intensive and time consuming. This is not something that you sit down and do in a few minutes, but need to set aside a good hour for. Perfect for doing with a coffee in one hand on a Sunday morning.

If you look at the full sized results on flickr, you can see that there is some weird posterized-halo-effects around the brighter lights which I wasn’t able to fix in this piece, but I have a feeling that this is determined by how the program blends the images in the first place. For this I simply used photoshop, but would probably get different results from something like photomatix pro, a stand-alone HDR processing app that seems to be popular with the HDR crowd.

Stuck in Customs has a great tutorial on HDR imaging which is worth a read, although he uses a different workflow, and the aesthetic is pretty heavy-handed, but it’s the same principles.

So it looks like I’ve still got a lot to learn with this HDR stuff, but check back to see how things are progressing over the coming months.