How to Photograph High-Contrast Landscapes: Dynamic Range, HDR, and Bracketing
You took the picture — a sunrise over the bay, a forest with sunlit openings, or a bright sky over a dark shoreline. When you looked at it on the screen, though, something was just not right. The sky was way too bright, and the ground looked good, or the sky was lovely but the rocks that gave it such character were buried in darkness. Your eyes are able to see both lights and darks in a scene, and that’s partly what drew you to want that shot. The camera, though, isn’t the same as your eye. Living eyes, when they function as designed, are able to perceive a broad dynamic range — the difference between the brightest and darkest tones in a scene. Most consumer-level—and even many professional—cameras cannot capture the full range of detail our eyes can perceive in a high-contrast scene in a single exposure. Today we’re going to look at dynamic range, and how to trick a camera into seeing the way you see. As a bonus, we’ll peek into how to “fix it in post” — make adjustments in our processing software — when we can’t quite get it right in the camera.
What Dynamic Range Means
Dynamic range is the amount of brightness a scene contains, from deep shadow to brilliant sunlight. Bright midday sun, sunrises and sunsets, subjects that are lit from behind, interiors that have window light, and reflective water can all create scenes with wide dynamic range.
But there are different types of dynamic range. Scene dynamic range is the brightness range that exists in front of the camera. The Camera dynamic range is how much of that range the camera’s sensor can capture in one exposure. Then there’s the display or print dynamic range, which is how much tonal information (the information of the color tones) can be shown on a screen or printed on media.
Photographers measure differences in brightness in “stops.” One stop is a doubling or halving of light. So when a scene spans eight stops, the highlights contain about 256 times more light than the darkest shadows—often more range than a single exposure can comfortably hold. That’s what we consider “high dynamic range” or “high contrast.”
Why Our Eyes See Differently
The human eye is amazingly adaptable to changes as we look from dark areas to bright areas. A camera records one exposure at a specific moment and can’t always hold the shadow and highlight detail the same way our eyes perceive it. This isn’t a camera failure; it’s just a creative and technical challenge that photographers have to learn to manage. If you’re looking at a marsh at sunset, your eyes are able to pick up the texture of the grasses in the foreground as well as the varied colors in the sky. The camera is going to favor either the foreground or the sky.
The First Choice: What Matters Most?
It’s not always easy to figure out how to shoot a high-contrast image. We want to retain the details in the whole scene, and that’s not easy if all you want is to point and shoot. Your best friend, your best tool in getting these shots, is the Pause. Stop for just a minute before you go changing settings, and ask yourself, “Which part of this image must retain detail? What will we miss if we lose detail there?” Protecting highlights in colorful skies, whitewater, clouds, and snow is important, because if those areas get overexposed, there will be data in those areas that we can’t recover. That’s what photographers mean when “the highlights are blown out.” All you see is white, but that white is always going to be just plain white. No matter what you do to that area in a processing program, it’s still always just going to be white. No cloud details, no water movement suggestions, just white.
If that’s what you’re going for, if you don’t need those highlight details, that’s when you shoot it that way — when it’s intentional, when that’s the story you’re trying to tell. If you’re aiming for a silhouette, you may need to let the highlights lose the details. Exposure is an artistic decision, not just a correction to technical details. Tell your story, but don’t default to it.
Practical Ways to Handle Dynamic Range
Since your camera can’t capture everything you see, and you want it to do exactly that, we’re going to have to try and “trick” it into giving us something close to what we want. And, when the camera can’t, we’ll work around that as well. Here are the methods we’ll use.
Expose for Highlights
Start by pointing your lens at the brightest important part of the scene and depress the shutter halfway. That will meter the exposure without taking the picture. You’ll need to keep the shutter control in that position while you look at the histogram on the screen, if your camera supports a live histogram. The histogram will show you tonal distribution, and other tools can show highlight warnings, which will be more useful than just looking at the screen. (I have a post on what the histogram can show you here.) The camera will try to adjust for all that brightness, which may look like the darker areas will be underexposed. That’s fine, because we can often recover much of that information in post-processing, but the highlights would be lost. When we go into post-processing, we can lift those shadows and leave the rest of the image alone. Of course, the processing possibilities will depend on your camera, the ISO setting, the file type, and how much underexposed the shadows are. Lifting those shadows may also introduce more noise, flatten the other colors, and reduce other detail.
Use a Graduated Neutral Density Filter
Graduated neutral density (ND) filters are darker at the top and lighter at the bottom, but the camera doesn’t see it like that. The filter filters out light at the sky area while letting in more light in the ground area. It balances a bright sky with a darker foreground. GND filters can work especially well when you have a clean horizon, like a beach, open water, plains, or large skies. They can still work with mountains, trees, and buildings in the frame, but not as well. Still, for the parts that the filter causes to be just a bit underexposed, you may be able to fix that in post-production.
Bracket Your Exposures
Exposure Bracketing is taking several shots, as close to identical as possible, except for using different brightness levels. You start at a normal exposure, then take one darker that grabs all the highlights, then one brighter that takes in all the details in the shadows. Modern cameras that allow you to change settings manually offer exposure bracketing as a setting. On my Canon, I can select several different options for how many exposures I want to take — how many shots overall — as well as how different I want each exposure to be. You’ll want to use a tripod for this, because the heavy lift of combining the images will be done in post-production, and the program is happiest when it doesn’t have to work too hard to line the images up. It’s helpful as well to use an external shutter control or a timer, so that you don’t move the camera during exposure.
Blend Exposures in Editing
We can (and often do) merge bracketed image files into one image as High Dynamic Range (HDR). We can also use masks in Photoshop or another processing program. It takes longer and requires patience, but it’s a skill worth developing, because you can use the techniques in other projects. An HDR workflow combines the differently-exposed frames into a composite image with the details across a broader range of tones. There are also software filters that can do this, but a little goes a long way, and it’s easy to overdo the HDR effect. The goal is a believable photograph that reflects the feeling of the scene, and you can quickly come away with halos, muddy shadows, or unnatural color. I did that once with a photo of a stream tumbling over a small cataract. It’s a beautiful picture as long as your standing across the room, and I’m glad I saved a copy of the original. The original did need some help to bring out the depths of the water, but I overdid it.
This was the original image:
This was my overprocessed experiment:
When HDR Helps — and When it Doesn’t
Using an HDR technique isn’t the answer for every exposure difficulty, but where these methods work, they work extremely well. For a still landscape at sunrise or sunset, you can bracket exposures or use a graduated neutral density filter. Bracketing also works well for a bright sky over a dark coastal foreground, where you want to see those dark details but also protect the highlights. It’s also a good option in a high-contrast interior scene with windows that bring in natural light, if the subject isn’t moving.
However, it’s not always the best solution. If your subject is moving, you’ll probably want to use a single exposure. Bracketing a moving subject can cause “ghosting” of the motion. It can be an interesting effect, but it’s rarely what you want in a landscape. There is also software that can accommodate that motion. When you’re going for a silhouetted subject, you won’t want a bracketed shot there, either. You’ll expose for that brighter background, which will make your silhouette really stand out. And for a soft, overcast landscape, you can grab one good exposure for the whole scene.
You’ll need to keep a natural touch when editing with HDR. You want to start with global adjustments, like recovering highlights, adjusting shadows, whites, blacks, and contrast. You can use local adjustments to guide the viewer’s attention, like darkening a sky that’s too bright or maybe lifting a bit of detail in the foreground. It’s easy to overprocess, though, and you’ll end up with halos around trees, horizons, and buildings, gray, flat-looking shadows, and overly saturated skies. You can also get a texture that looks crunchy or artificial. It can help to step away from the edit for a bit, and then come back to it.
A Field Workflow to Try
Sometimes we learn a technique serendipitously, but we remember it better if we put a concerted effort to it. Give this series of actions a try so that you’ll at least be familiar with it.
- Compose the image and identify the brightest and darkest important areas.
2 Check the histogram and highlight alert. - Make one exposure that protects the highlights.
- Make a second exposure that favors the shadow detail.
- Add a middle exposure if the scene needs it.
- Review all of the exposures for movement in the water, grasses, branches, wildlife, or people.
- When you get home, compare the single exposure with the bracketed set before you decide if a blend is necessary.
A Creative Perspective
At the end of the discussion, dynamic range is more than just a technical obstacle — it’s a factor in your creative options. Contrast carries a heavy influence over mood. Deep shadows can feel dramatic, full of mystery, or intimate, and balanced detail may feel calm, expansive, adn immersive. You get to choose the tonal treatment that expresses what drew you to the scene in the first place. By understanding dynamic range, we can spend less time fighting difficult light and more time creating with it.
Your Turn
Since cameras don’t see exactly as we do, we make thoughtful choices about what the final image communicates. When you encounter a scene with bright highlights and deep shadows, do you protect the highlights, embrace the silhouette, or bracket for a blend? It partly depends, for me, on which camera I’m carrying. Let me hear your thoughts in the comments.
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