HDR Wedding Photos

studio1972

Anybody got experience of doing HDRs at weddings?

I love experimenting with HDRs and I'm starting to take 3 or 4 of them at weddings when the opportunity arrises. Is anybody else doing this, and what do your clients think?

I've attached an example. Not totally happy with the composition as I would prefer to have the feet in it.

ront

I am really starting to like HDR also, but I am not sure about the shadows on their faces here. Especially his. There are also halos around them and I am not sure about the blurring of the background either here. To me, it looks like motion blur and not DOF blur. Were you using a tripod?

Ron

cj99si

Not a fan. No harm in experimenting though!

dank-photo

I haven't done much HDR work myself, but I think it's better suited for situations where you really need the full dynamic range to make a dramatic image...or where there's texture and detail that you want to make "pop" in the darker areas. I think this shot in particular would be stronger without it...just one opinion.

-Dan K.

The Mack

Try to get rid of the halo's.
I don't think HDR's are well w/ people.

Ed911

I'm not that opposed to doing a pseudo HDR's of people. I haven't tried it much, but I can see from what you have done here that it can work...especially with the younger generation.

When you say HDR, do you actually mean pseudo-HDR...Adobe plug-in kinda stuff? I'm wondering how you got your clients to stand that still for an actual HDR composite of three or four images. But, I'm not saying that you didn't.

One note about using HDR effects on people, I've found that sometimes less is more.

Thanks for sharing.

studio1972

Thanks for your thoughts.

To answer a few questions:

1. The images were taken at f2.8 so some of the background blurring is DoF
2. They were hand held at 6fps on my 40d, using a tripod would help, but is much less spontaneous of course.
3. After tonal mapping I applied the Glamour Glow filter from Color Efex Pro which does soften the image a little further.

I've used Viveza to bring up the shadows on their faces and to reduce the saturation slightly, hopefully you can see the difference.

I tonal mapped with Photomatix using the details enhancer and went for a fairly striking look (not at all subtle), unfortunately this results in the halos that people have noticed, although some people might like that effect I guess.

One problem I had was that the sky was completely grey that day (the HDR actually makes it look more uneven than it was to the human eye). I think this effect will work much better with sun breaking through clouds (I'll attach another photo to show what I mean). By the way, how do you attach more than one photo to a post on here?

studio1972

This photo shows the sort of sky I really like for HDRs, this was also taken hand held BTW

studio1972

The Mack wrote:

Try to get rid of the halo's.
I don't think HDR's are well w/ people.

One problem with having people in the photo is that if you do a lot of processing to the photo it makes them look strange (e.g. upping the saturation or adjusting the white balance). You can get away with a lot more on a landscape photo.