Well none, because he didn't have the software. If it had been available, odds are he would have used it.
We have no way of knowing what he would or would not have used, and I don't think it's honest to try to support one side or another by making unsupportable claims about what he would or would not have done.
Were he still alive and active today, I would not be surprised if he experimented with HDR. Whether he would find it useful, and whether he would actually release images to the public that he made with HDR, is another question. He did experiment with color photography (there's even a book out now, Ansel Adams in Color), but I don't think he ever released any of his color experiments to the public during his lifetime.
We have no way of knowing what he would or would not have used, and I don't think it's honest to try to support one side or another by making unsupportable claims about what he would or would not have done.
Given Adam's use and development of various techniques on both the front and back-end of photography I think it's fair to hypothesize or extrapolate his use of this and other technologies if he were alive today.
Of course you can't say for sure but it is a reasonable assumption.
Moderator Journeys/Sports/Big Picture :: Need some help with dgrin?
Given Adam's use and development of various techniques on both the front and back-end of photography I think it's fair to hypothesize or extrapolate his use of this and other technologies if he were alive today.
Of course you can't say for sure but it is a reasonable assumption.
If you read the second paragraph of my comment, I agreed that he would likely have experimented with HDR and other modern techniques, but whether he would have considered them worthwhile or even artistically valid is an unanswerable question. Remember, we're talking about a guy who held strong reservations about the merits of color photography as late as the early 1980s, and never (as far as I know) released any of his own color experiments to the public.
I think it's safe to say, though, that even if he could have lived long enough to use HDR, and even if he liked it, his use of it would have been a LOT better and more subtle than 99% of the HDR crud we see today. He certainly made heavy use of darkroom techniques like dodging and burning, but because of his skill with these techniques, you often can't tell where he used them. This is not something that can be said of very many HDR images.
Okay, HDR to me, is like a woman who has taken all of her clothes off to impress me. Sure, she might look nice for a while but then my brain will eventually kick in and start to wonder if she's lost her marbles.
What I'm trying to say is... HDR leaves nothing left to the imagination your brain uses to make inferences from shadows and things you can't see. It takes away from half of lights power... which is to create darkness.
Thoughts?
I need to get this thread back OT.
"A women who has taken all her clothes off"... please continue...
okok....
OP, I dont have a clue how to use a HDR program, but I do layer HDR into my hobbist shots using PS...
With that said, Why whine about how anybody does anything....Do you like the end result? or NOT? Why insult somebody in how they did it due to your tunnel vision....??
I would bet your going to use a HDR program one of these days and then POST a rant about people that dont use it.....
Right, I understand that it isn't inherent with the tool. What I understand less is why some people seem to think that it's "art."
Funny you say that... 20 years ago you could apply that statment to photography altogether:D
also, a side note..... maybe in 20 years some of the crazy bad HDR prints of recent years will be selling in some fancy auction in NY for 10 million buckos....
Funny you say that... 20 years ago you could apply that statment to photography altogether:D
also, a side note..... maybe in 20 years some of the crazy bad HDR prints of recent years will be selling in some fancy auction in NY for 10 million buckos....
AaronNelson, see my .sig for some thoughts on that.
also, a side note..... maybe in 20 years some of the crazy bad HDR prints of recent years will be selling in some fancy auction in NY for 10 million buckos....
Okay, HDR to me, is like a woman who has taken all of her clothes off to impress me. Sure, she might look nice for a while but then my brain will eventually kick in and start to wonder if she's lost her marbles.
What I'm trying to say is... HDR leaves nothing left to the imagination your brain uses to make inferences from shadows and things you can't see. It takes away from half of lights power... which is to create darkness.
Thoughts?
People said this about color television. Black and White was great because it allowed the imagination to go to work.
Early color photography was not considered for "serious" photographic endeavors because you had to relinquish so much control over the process that you enjoyed with B+W capture and processing.
Digital color photography has pretty much changed all of that.
I suspect that as HDR matures as both a process and a technique that we will see staggering changes in the results, both for the "good" and for the "bad".
Good and bad photography will, however, always be relative and qualitative, and subject to both individual expression and individual interpretation.
Good and bad photography will, however, always be relative and qualitative, and subject to both individual expression and individual interpretation.
C'est la vie.
But it's also true that most of it will suck and some of it will end up in the NY MOMA. It's subjective, true, but that doesn't mean it's arbitrary. The same can be said for all other forms of art.
Based on what I’ve read on the subject and from what I’ve seen displayed by a number of folks in various forums, it seems to me there is some confusion on the subject of HDR and Tone Mapping. A lot of the images I see displayed as HDR are really in fact more a product of an HDR image that has been further processed with Tone Mapping even though one can create an HDR image Without doing any tone mapping assuming one has the right software and understands the difference. Unfortunately it seems that many of the commercial programs for windows come with tone mapping as part of the process and don’t allow you to simply save the HDR image without further processing. I also think that many folks get caught up in the Wow factor of tone mapping and tend to over do it.
Since I recently threw out my Winders OS and went with Linux I have found a number of tools that do image alignment, create HDR images directly (using the Mertens-Kautz-Van Reeth exposure fusion algorithm) without needing to do any tone mapping or other post processing to get a displayable image. To me it seems that because so many of the popular programs include tone mapping of sort in the work flow that has contributed to the confusion between the two. Couple that with the whole wow factor of tone mapping has led to many of the complaints or rants about HDR producing images that some find to be way over processed and resulting in images that are anything but realistic.
I have also discovered that if you get the windows version of Luminance HDR you can open up a command line window, cd into the programs directory where the Luminance HDR file reside and run both align_image_stack and enfuse from the command line and produce images that are HDR without having to do any tone processing. You can then bring those images into any photo editing software and do any of the normal workflow on them.
Here are a few examples I created to try and exemplify the differences as I see it all based on a single scene.
The first is a straight conversion from the middle “neutral” (ev +-0) image of a set of three bracketed images using ufraw. No post processing, other than what the software does in converting the RAW image to jpg. Note the shadows (esp. around the hull of the boat).
Now here is one that was done in HDR using the three shots from the bracketed exposures of the scene above using align_image_stack to well, align them obviously, and then enfuse using an exposure fusion algorithm to create a tiff image. Keep in mind this is a “straight” conversion using a command line driven program in Linux that simply creates a single image using an exposure fusion algorithm with no further processing (see first article below). Again note the shadows and compare them to the one above. Note to that the contrast is somewhat reduced giving a more even overall tone. This to me is one of the several uses of HDR, probably not so much used as it is for bringing detail out of shadows that would otherwise be in total darkness or subduing over blown highlights. This is a subtle use of HDR but I think it does give a slightly better rendition of the scene compared to the original. And while you could probably do the same thing with Photoshop in cases like this, its not quite the same thing but that is, I realize, a totally subjective opinion.
As far as I'm concerned this image stands well as is, lighting more even, better detail in the shadows and looks more like what I saw without over doing the processing.
Now here is the first image above rendered with a Tone-Mapping program. I used Tonemapping LDR, a small fast Linux based program for these. Keep in mind this was using a Single LDR image Not the HDR image generated for photo number two
And going all the way, note how the halos have formed around areas of higher contrast and the surrealistic nature of these two last images.
In my view the last two are good examples of where tone mapping really does not work there is just to much halo effect due to the high contrast of the colors between the water and sky and other objects in the photo.
As for tone mapping a single LDR image, here a few more examples of tone mapping on a single image where tone mapping Does work but again within limitations. These were taken on a Very bright day in Las Vegas. For these I used a plug in for Gimp.
The first is the orginal followed by two tone mapped images of increasing intensity
And then I decided to play with another image of the desert taken on the same trip
The first was rendered in Tonemapping LDR then the next two were taken into a program called LightZone on my Linux machine where I played around with them using several different tools. What is interesting about LightZone is that each tool or process is applied on its own layer which means the base image is always intact. And like any layering secheme if you change the order of the layers the results change as well. When you save the image all the layer info is also saved but any other program only sees the result yet if you take it back into LightZone after editing it with something else the LightZone tool layers are still there with the changes made by the other program acting only on the base layer. Interesting approach and worth investigating some more.
Here are a couple of links of interest on HDR and Tone Mapping for those how care.
If you read carefully, you might have noticed that my description of the algorithm did not refer to the original scene at all. That distinction is what makes Enfuse so fast. High dynamic range (HDR) based tone-mapping apps always start by combining the input images into a reconstruction of the original scene, usually using the exposure information in the EXIF tags to properly arrange the input stack darkest to lightest. Only then can the HDR image be tone-mapped down into a regular TIFF or JPEG.
With exposure fusion, none of that is necessary. Each pixel of each image is graded on its individual merits alone. “
“ Tone mapping is the process in which the colors of an HDR image are mapped to a normal image (LDR). In other words the dynamic range of an HDR image is reduced to fit into a normal image (LDR).
The acronym HDR comes from the words High Dynamic Range. In a photo, dynamic range means the difference between the lightest and the darkest color value. In other words, dynamic range means the contrast of a photo. HDR photo means a photo which has larger dynamic range than an ordinary photo. HDR photos have larger dynamic range than today's digital consumer cameras are able to capture.
Some people might think that the purpose of HDRI is to produce unrealistically colorful, flat, or artistic photos. In my opinion the real purpose of HDR photography is to produce a photo, the quality of which is higher than that of a normal photo(LDR). The purpose of HDRI is to overcome the limitations of camera equipment. HDR photography has the following advantages when compared to normal photography:
HDR photography captures higher dynamic range
HDR photography can produce noise free photos “
RM
http://roadrunes.com
"It's better to bite the hand that feeds you, than to feed the hand that bites you" - Me
this one I really like not over done like many others I've seen. What’s curious about the images in that thread submitted by the OP is that the photographer mentions that his shots are single image HDR, to me that's a bit of misnomer, I'd call his work more in the line of tone mapped images, but that's just based on my perception of the differences between the two processes.
RM
http://roadrunes.com
"It's better to bite the hand that feeds you, than to feed the hand that bites you" - Me
Rocketman-
That was a very good, and very thorough, review of a subtle aspect of HDR photography. For the past two weeks, I've been immersing myself in HDR - as I recently took part in the Scott Kelby Photo Walk led by Brian Matiash who does very good work with this tool.
A few of my images have really improved by taking the 7-9 exposures and using the combination of Photomatix and LR. However, some have come out a bit too cooked no matter how muted I try to keep things in Photomatix and despite all manner of level work in LR. After reading your post, I'm going to explore the LR/enfuse plugin (available for Mac and PC and based on the open source Enfuse project) to see how it compares.
Thanks
E
Rocketman-
That was a very good, and very thorough, review of a subtle aspect of HDR photography. For the past two weeks, I've been immersing myself in HDR - as I recently took part in the Scott Kelby Photo Walk led by Brian Matiash who does very good work with this tool.
A few of my images have really improved by taking the 7-9 exposures and using the combination of Photomatix and LR. However, some have come out a bit too cooked no matter how muted I try to keep things in Photomatix and despite all manner of level work in LR. After reading your post, I'm going to explore the LR/enfuse plugin (available for Mac and PC and based on the open source Enfuse project) to see how it compares.
Thanks
E
good luck with it and note that I have been using mostly the default setting for enfuse, although sometimes I use the "-l" option and set to 15 or 20 if things don't quite "pop" enough yet keeping it within reason. the command line tool is really fast, but then I am a unix admin who's used to doing most work in that format so...
I really think HDR doesn't have to look overcooked, though it is fun to play with tone mapping for that surrealistic look that if that is what you are after. I'm going to have to check out that link you mentioned haven't read that one yet.
RM
http://roadrunes.com
"It's better to bite the hand that feeds you, than to feed the hand that bites you" - Me
If you want to compare what Adams did to work done today; it would be similar to masking and making level adjustments to dark and light areas. It is most definitely not HDR.
I agree. Ansel didn't produce darkroom HDR images. Jerry Uelsmann did, however.
I agree. Ansel didn't produce darkroom HDR images. Jerry Uelsmann did, however.
Why would you call these works HDR? These are various combinations of negatives used in conjunction with masking techniques to create the final product (which is impressive).
Adams didn't combine so much as mask/dodge and burn.
Moderator Journeys/Sports/Big Picture :: Need some help with dgrin?
{snip} ... I'm going to explore the LR/enfuse plugin (available for Mac and PC and based on the open source Enfuse project) to see how it compares.
Thanks
E
Have you gotten that to work? I downloaded it a couple of days ago and while LR3 said it was installed and running, I was unable to get it properly configured. I haven't had time yet to sit down and figure out what the problem was. I'm currently rebuilding my home network and have been somewhat preoccupied, but I'm curious about how this application works.
Have you gotten that to work? I downloaded it a couple of days ago and while LR3 said it was installed and running, I was unable to get it properly configured. I haven't had time yet to sit down and figure out what the problem was. I'm currently rebuilding my home network and have been somewhat preoccupied, but I'm curious about how this application works.
Why would you call these works HDR? These are various combinations of negatives used in conjunction with masking techniques to create the final product (which is impressive).
Just considering in general how he makes those prints, it's easy for me to call it HDR-esque. Say he wants to isolate a hand. Shoot the hand and absolutely overexpose everything else. That would give him a negative with the hand properly exposed and everything else would be black. Very little light will penetrate the negative in the thick regions, so a print of the hand alone will appear on white. In order to get it to work, he has to play with creatively exposing his film (in addition to masking, etc.).
Most of his work has a great deal of in-your-face surrealism. But some has more subtlety to it (sky exposure). For example, if this print were of a real scene, many people would call it HDR:
But, even though he is using multiple images, that is not HDR. It's complex masking and printing.
Personally, I very much like his work and especially his technique. It's amazing given he's doing it photographically and not in PS or other editing software.
Moderator Journeys/Sports/Big Picture :: Need some help with dgrin?
But, even though he is using multiple images, that is not HDR. It's complex masking and printing.
Personally, I very much like his work and especially his technique. It's amazing given he's doing it photographically and not in PS or other editing software.
Many of his images exhibit more dynamic range than a single film exposure will generally capture (which is more than I can say for the multitude of single-exposure tonemapped images on the web).
Many of his images exhibit more dynamic range than a single film exposure will generally capture (which is more than I can say for the multitude of single-exposure tonemapped images on the web).
But either way it's cool
Many negative film emulsions have much more dynamic range than a print, allowing considerable latitude and sloppy exposure (part of the reason for film's success over the years.)
Dodging, burning and masking techniques were indeed employed to produce print images with "enhanced" and selective tonalities. I don't think you can rightly call it "HDR" because I believe that is more of a digital invention, but it is certainly tonal manipulation.
When I used to regularly scan negatives I would indeed scan at multiple "exposures" for the scan and then use different tone blending techniques to produce more or less better results than a single scan could produce. I suppose that would more rightly be called "tone mapping" since I would generally use a high-contrast mask in the layers to help automate the blending.
Slides/transparencies are typically more problematic and similar to digital in terms of absolute tonal range and recoverable tones.
Comments
We have no way of knowing what he would or would not have used, and I don't think it's honest to try to support one side or another by making unsupportable claims about what he would or would not have done.
Were he still alive and active today, I would not be surprised if he experimented with HDR. Whether he would find it useful, and whether he would actually release images to the public that he made with HDR, is another question. He did experiment with color photography (there's even a book out now, Ansel Adams in Color), but I don't think he ever released any of his color experiments to the public during his lifetime.
Got bored with digital and went back to film.
Given Adam's use and development of various techniques on both the front and back-end of photography I think it's fair to hypothesize or extrapolate his use of this and other technologies if he were alive today.
Of course you can't say for sure but it is a reasonable assumption.
If you read the second paragraph of my comment, I agreed that he would likely have experimented with HDR and other modern techniques, but whether he would have considered them worthwhile or even artistically valid is an unanswerable question. Remember, we're talking about a guy who held strong reservations about the merits of color photography as late as the early 1980s, and never (as far as I know) released any of his own color experiments to the public.
I think it's safe to say, though, that even if he could have lived long enough to use HDR, and even if he liked it, his use of it would have been a LOT better and more subtle than 99% of the HDR crud we see today. He certainly made heavy use of darkroom techniques like dodging and burning, but because of his skill with these techniques, you often can't tell where he used them. This is not something that can be said of very many HDR images.
Got bored with digital and went back to film.
Moderator of the Technique Forum and Finishing School on Dgrin
Link to my Smugmug site
I need to get this thread back OT.
"A women who has taken all her clothes off"... please continue...
okok....
OP, I dont have a clue how to use a HDR program, but I do layer HDR into my hobbist shots using PS...
With that said, Why whine about how anybody does anything....Do you like the end result? or NOT? Why insult somebody in how they did it due to your tunnel vision....??
I would bet your going to use a HDR program one of these days and then POST a rant about people that dont use it.....
I've thought the same thing....
Funny you say that... 20 years ago you could apply that statment to photography altogether:D
also, a side note..... maybe in 20 years some of the crazy bad HDR prints of recent years will be selling in some fancy auction in NY for 10 million buckos....
AaronNelson, see my .sig for some thoughts on that.
Wanna bet?
People said this about color television. Black and White was great because it allowed the imagination to go to work.
Digital color photography has pretty much changed all of that.
I suspect that as HDR matures as both a process and a technique that we will see staggering changes in the results, both for the "good" and for the "bad".
Good and bad photography will, however, always be relative and qualitative, and subject to both individual expression and individual interpretation.
C'est la vie.
Moderator of the Cameras and Accessories forums
Link to my Smugmug site
This photo is awesome (from the thread here) http://digitalgrin.com/showthread.php?t=126423
Since I recently threw out my Winders OS and went with Linux I have found a number of tools that do image alignment, create HDR images directly (using the Mertens-Kautz-Van Reeth exposure fusion algorithm) without needing to do any tone mapping or other post processing to get a displayable image. To me it seems that because so many of the popular programs include tone mapping of sort in the work flow that has contributed to the confusion between the two. Couple that with the whole wow factor of tone mapping has led to many of the complaints or rants about HDR producing images that some find to be way over processed and resulting in images that are anything but realistic.
I have also discovered that if you get the windows version of Luminance HDR you can open up a command line window, cd into the programs directory where the Luminance HDR file reside and run both align_image_stack and enfuse from the command line and produce images that are HDR without having to do any tone processing. You can then bring those images into any photo editing software and do any of the normal workflow on them.
Here is a good workflow discussion on using these tools, the command line options are the same in the windows versions of the tools as in the Linux version.
http://photoblog.edu-perez.com/2009/02/hdr-and-linux.html
Here are a few examples I created to try and exemplify the differences as I see it all based on a single scene.
The first is a straight conversion from the middle “neutral” (ev +-0) image of a set of three bracketed images using ufraw. No post processing, other than what the software does in converting the RAW image to jpg. Note the shadows (esp. around the hull of the boat).
Now here is one that was done in HDR using the three shots from the bracketed exposures of the scene above using align_image_stack to well, align them obviously, and then enfuse using an exposure fusion algorithm to create a tiff image. Keep in mind this is a “straight” conversion using a command line driven program in Linux that simply creates a single image using an exposure fusion algorithm with no further processing (see first article below). Again note the shadows and compare them to the one above. Note to that the contrast is somewhat reduced giving a more even overall tone. This to me is one of the several uses of HDR, probably not so much used as it is for bringing detail out of shadows that would otherwise be in total darkness or subduing over blown highlights. This is a subtle use of HDR but I think it does give a slightly better rendition of the scene compared to the original. And while you could probably do the same thing with Photoshop in cases like this, its not quite the same thing but that is, I realize, a totally subjective opinion.
As far as I'm concerned this image stands well as is, lighting more even, better detail in the shadows and looks more like what I saw without over doing the processing.
Now here is the first image above rendered with a Tone-Mapping program. I used Tonemapping LDR, a small fast Linux based program for these. Keep in mind this was using a Single LDR image Not the HDR image generated for photo number two
And going all the way, note how the halos have formed around areas of higher contrast and the surrealistic nature of these two last images.
In my view the last two are good examples of where tone mapping really does not work there is just to much halo effect due to the high contrast of the colors between the water and sky and other objects in the photo.
As for tone mapping a single LDR image, here a few more examples of tone mapping on a single image where tone mapping Does work but again within limitations. These were taken on a Very bright day in Las Vegas. For these I used a plug in for Gimp.
The first is the orginal followed by two tone mapped images of increasing intensity
And then I decided to play with another image of the desert taken on the same trip
The first was rendered in Tonemapping LDR then the next two were taken into a program called LightZone on my Linux machine where I played around with them using several different tools. What is interesting about LightZone is that each tool or process is applied on its own layer which means the base image is always intact. And like any layering secheme if you change the order of the layers the results change as well. When you save the image all the layer info is also saved but any other program only sees the result yet if you take it back into LightZone after editing it with something else the LightZone tool layers are still there with the changes made by the other program acting only on the base layer. Interesting approach and worth investigating some more.
Here are a couple of links of interest on HDR and Tone Mapping for those how care.
From http://www.linux.com/archive/feature/127062
If you read carefully, you might have noticed that my description of the algorithm did not refer to the original scene at all. That distinction is what makes Enfuse so fast. High dynamic range (HDR) based tone-mapping apps always start by combining the input images into a reconstruction of the original scene, usually using the exposure information in the EXIF tags to properly arrange the input stack darkest to lightest. Only then can the HDR image be tone-mapped down into a regular TIFF or JPEG.
With exposure fusion, none of that is necessary. Each pixel of each image is graded on its individual merits alone. “
From http://www.secondpicture.com/tutorials/photography/tone_mapping.html
“ Tone mapping is the process in which the colors of an HDR image are mapped to a normal image (LDR). In other words the dynamic range of an HDR image is reduced to fit into a normal image (LDR).
The acronym HDR comes from the words High Dynamic Range. In a photo, dynamic range means the difference between the lightest and the darkest color value. In other words, dynamic range means the contrast of a photo. HDR photo means a photo which has larger dynamic range than an ordinary photo. HDR photos have larger dynamic range than today's digital consumer cameras are able to capture.
Some people might think that the purpose of HDRI is to produce unrealistically colorful, flat, or artistic photos. In my opinion the real purpose of HDR photography is to produce a photo, the quality of which is higher than that of a normal photo(LDR). The purpose of HDRI is to overcome the limitations of camera equipment. HDR photography has the following advantages when compared to normal photography:
HDR photography captures higher dynamic range
HDR photography can produce noise free photos “
RM
"It's better to bite the hand that feeds you, than to feed the hand that bites you" - Me
this one I really like not over done like many others I've seen. What’s curious about the images in that thread submitted by the OP is that the photographer mentions that his shots are single image HDR, to me that's a bit of misnomer, I'd call his work more in the line of tone mapped images, but that's just based on my perception of the differences between the two processes.
RM
"It's better to bite the hand that feeds you, than to feed the hand that bites you" - Me
That was a very good, and very thorough, review of a subtle aspect of HDR photography. For the past two weeks, I've been immersing myself in HDR - as I recently took part in the Scott Kelby Photo Walk led by Brian Matiash who does very good work with this tool.
A few of my images have really improved by taking the 7-9 exposures and using the combination of Photomatix and LR. However, some have come out a bit too cooked no matter how muted I try to keep things in Photomatix and despite all manner of level work in LR. After reading your post, I'm going to explore the LR/enfuse plugin (available for Mac and PC and based on the open source Enfuse project) to see how it compares.
Thanks
E
My site | Non-MHD Landscapes |Google+ | Twitter | Facebook | Smugmug photos
good luck with it and note that I have been using mostly the default setting for enfuse, although sometimes I use the "-l" option and set to 15 or 20 if things don't quite "pop" enough yet keeping it within reason. the command line tool is really fast, but then I am a unix admin who's used to doing most work in that format so...
I really think HDR doesn't have to look overcooked, though it is fun to play with tone mapping for that surrealistic look that if that is what you are after. I'm going to have to check out that link you mentioned haven't read that one yet.
RM
"It's better to bite the hand that feeds you, than to feed the hand that bites you" - Me
What makes you suggest that HDR must be done in software?
I agree. Ansel didn't produce darkroom HDR images. Jerry Uelsmann did, however.
That's a cool gallery..
Why would you call these works HDR? These are various combinations of negatives used in conjunction with masking techniques to create the final product (which is impressive).
Adams didn't combine so much as mask/dodge and burn.
Have you gotten that to work? I downloaded it a couple of days ago and while LR3 said it was installed and running, I was unable to get it properly configured. I haven't had time yet to sit down and figure out what the problem was. I'm currently rebuilding my home network and have been somewhat preoccupied, but I'm curious about how this application works.
My site 365 Project
http://forum.fourthirdsphoto.com/showthread.php?t=59219&highlight=enfuse
Looks great, now if I can only figure out why I couldn't get it to work on my system.
My site 365 Project
Just considering in general how he makes those prints, it's easy for me to call it HDR-esque. Say he wants to isolate a hand. Shoot the hand and absolutely overexpose everything else. That would give him a negative with the hand properly exposed and everything else would be black. Very little light will penetrate the negative in the thick regions, so a print of the hand alone will appear on white. In order to get it to work, he has to play with creatively exposing his film (in addition to masking, etc.).
Most of his work has a great deal of in-your-face surrealism. But some has more subtlety to it (sky exposure). For example, if this print were of a real scene, many people would call it HDR:
Personally, I very much like his work and especially his technique. It's amazing given he's doing it photographically and not in PS or other editing software.
Many of his images exhibit more dynamic range than a single film exposure will generally capture (which is more than I can say for the multitude of single-exposure tonemapped images on the web).
But either way it's cool
Many negative film emulsions have much more dynamic range than a print, allowing considerable latitude and sloppy exposure (part of the reason for film's success over the years.)
Dodging, burning and masking techniques were indeed employed to produce print images with "enhanced" and selective tonalities. I don't think you can rightly call it "HDR" because I believe that is more of a digital invention, but it is certainly tonal manipulation.
When I used to regularly scan negatives I would indeed scan at multiple "exposures" for the scan and then use different tone blending techniques to produce more or less better results than a single scan could produce. I suppose that would more rightly be called "tone mapping" since I would generally use a high-contrast mask in the layers to help automate the blending.
Slides/transparencies are typically more problematic and similar to digital in terms of absolute tonal range and recoverable tones.
Moderator of the Cameras and Accessories forums