dynamic range – Ming Thein

Thoughts on achieving natural tonality

September 2, 2015 by Ming Thein

Riddle of the day: what do a good magic trick and a good photograph have in common – or by extension, a good prestidigitator and a good photographer?

The answer is of course both of them distort your perceived reality. The magician makes you believe you saw something that’s physically impossible, or at very least completely unexpected. The photographer presents you with either something you may not have expected, or could not previsualize. Both are technicians in a sense, but the best of both professions are more than that – they’re also psychologists. At this point, you are probably wondering what any of this has to do with tonality. Read on to find out.

Repost: HDR, the zone system, and dynamic range

August 31, 2015 by Ming Thein

My eyes, my eyes! I had to work quite hard to make this as a) I don’t own any of those filter programs and b) I don’t do this kind of hyper toned, overlapping HDR. The actual, final version of this image is at the end of the article.

Note: I’m reposting this article as a refresher before I talk about something a little harder to define in the next one.

HDR/ High Dynamic Range photography is perhaps one of the greatest blessings and curses of the digital age of imaging. On one hand, we have retina-searing rubbish that’s put out by people who for some odd reason celebrate the unnaturalness of the images, encouraged by the companies who make the filters that make doing this kind of thing too easy – and on the other hand, there are a lot of HDR images out there that you probably wouldn’t have pegged as being anything other than natural. There is, of course, a way to do it right, and a way to do it wrong. I use HDR techniques in almost all of my images – I live in the tropics, remember, and noon contrast can exceed 16 stops from deep shadows to extreme highlights – we simply have no choice if you want to produce a natural-looking scene.