Church Wedding HDR

anvilimage

While recently shooting a wedding at St Domenic's Church in San Francisco, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to grab this hand-held HDR shot during the ceremony. I hadn't planned on shooting HDR for this event, but something caught my eye and I quickly set it up and snapped it. Read more about this image on my blog @ http://anvilimage.com/2010/07/19/ppgba-print-of-the-month-july-2010/ .

Playing to the Masses


-joe

Ed911

Let me be the first to congratulate you. Wonderful HDR...what a capture.

Thanks for sharing.

Darren Troy C

What an incredible shot! Nice eye!

mmmatt

What's the trick to doing a handheld hdr? I didn't think that was even possible without a pod. Nice image, but as a nit the curtain is showing through the organists head.



Matt

*edit* actually I think that may be his hairline, but if it were me I would give the guy a touchup there because the line is in line with the flow of the curtains.

Blurmore

I'll give you the highest compliment I can give an HDR image...it only looks a little fake. Nice shot.

heatherfeather

I really like it. For me it has a Rockwell feel to it: the wedding from the organist's perspective. I almost expected to find some funny piece of humanity in it... like a dog at his feet or something.

What a gorgeous church!!!

ImageX Photography

Awesome shot!!! The couple is gonna love it!!!

mmmatt wrote: »

What's the trick to doing a handheld hdr? I didn't think that was even possible without a pod. Nice image, but as a nit the curtain is showing through the organists head.



Matt

You can either make 3 separate images from one raw file or programs such as Photmatix will perfectly align multiple hand held images for you.

mercphoto

I like it as well. Its not over the top, and that's a good thing! But is there something funky going on with the organist's head?

Matthew Saville

YES, this is HDR done RIGHT. Aside from a few edges here and there, it looks perfectly natural. LOVE IT!

=Matt=

mmmatt

ImageX Photography wrote: »

Awesome shot!!! The couple is gonna love it!!!




You can either make 3 separate images from one raw file or programs such as Photmatix will perfectly align multiple hand held images for you.

Ive tried it in PS with 3 exposures of a raw file and it didn't look anything like this. I imagine you lose a lot of the edges if you hand hold 3 images though, yes?

Matt

Qarik

*clap clap clap*

JayClark79

mmmmatt I believe CS5 makes it even easier to do HDR where you can select 1 of the images as the main image, and only get the color range (i think thats how they put it) from the other image.... this comes in handy when doing an HDR for example of a wave..... with out this typically the waves would be blurry because you'd have 3 pictures of the same wave all in different locations.... I think i explained that correctly lol.

jcimageworks

Great Processing!

ImageX Photography

mmmatt wrote: »

Ive tried it in PS with 3 exposures of a raw file and it didn't look anything like this. I imagine you lose a lot of the edges if you hand hold 3 images though, yes?

Matt

I like to use this image as my example for hand held HDR. It has such fine lines with all the foliage and stuff and it lines up PERFECTLY. 3 shots with the camera swaying in the wind! Photomatix is the way to go. I can never get HDR from Raw to look the way I want.

cdonovan

I opened this tread totally expecting to hate this... as I do most other attempts at HDR, especially with people in it..this is nice, very very nice!!

anvilimage

@Ed911: Thank you very much!

@mmmatt: When I shoot hand-held HDR I brace myself if I can on something nearby like a mailbox, parking meter, or in this case, a doorway. Make sure my camera is set on rapid fire, lock my focus, exhale, hold it, and fire off three successive shots. There's a great Joe McNally vid about body positioning that helped a lot that you can see here:

http://anvilimage.com/2010/04/27/hand-held-hdr-and-sf-financial-district/

...and yes, I contemplated giving the guy a little touch-up in the hair. Ironically, the editorial shooter in me decided to leave it more realistic...

FYI: I'm using Photomatix not PS for HDR. Photomatix has a pretty good algorithm for aligning images and removing background movements. It seems that vertical/horizontal shifts of the focal plane aren't too much of a problem but when the focal plane skews between images you have issues.

You can try Photomatix for free, just download it. It will watermark your images but you can save the tonemapping settings when you save the image and reprocess later if you decide to purchase the software.

@heatherfeather: Yes, it is a great location! I wasn't familiar with it when the groom told me of the location and got super psyched when I saw the Google Maps street view. I love architecture!

@JayClark79: I have yet to play with CS5, but Photomatix has a few different settings for reducing background/subject movement and sometimes I'll process a few times with different settings to get the best result. Of course, if the ghosting isn't too bad, I just take care of it in the next steps of my workflow when I do some layered exposure blending to correct areas that wouldn't balance in HDR processing.

@ImageX Photography: I love tractors as much as I love architecture... Great image! When you say that you can't get HDR to look the way you want from RAW, do you mean that you shoot in jpg instead? I shoot in RAW and I export from LR3 to Photomatix with their plugin, but I think it actually uses Adobe to convert the RAW to a tif and shoves them together in Photomatix.

@cdonovan: As someone that does HDR quite a bit, I also am not fond of the super saturated and heavily halo'd look, either! I'm glad it wasn't what you expected...

Thanks everybody for your comments!

-joe

ImageX Photography

anvilimage wrote: »

@Ed911:
@ImageX Photography: I love tractors as much as I love architecture... Great image! When you say that you can't get HDR to look the way you want from RAW, do you mean that you shoot in jpg instead? I shoot in RAW and I export from LR3 to Photomatix with their plugin, but I think it actually uses Adobe to convert the RAW to a tif and shoves them together in Photomatix.

Thanks for the compliment!

I have tried creating 3 separate tiffs from 1 RAW file and then process them in Photomatix. I just can't get them to look quite right. Not sure what I am doing wrong BUT I am happy shooting JPEG. I think I will only shoot RAW(NEF) when the shoot is critical and there can be no exposure mistakes ect ect. Mainly for.... imagine this... Weddings!!! haha I know your couple loved your HDR shot. Any couple would and it's something "different" for them. I am doing my cousin's wedding in a few months and I will be doing lots of HDR shots.... before and during the ceremony. I also plan on going to the church in a few weeks to get a lot of shots of the church... inside and out. She'll love them.

anvilimage

I hadn't planned on shooting HDR for this wedding, I just saw the opportunity and grabbed the shot. They were tucked so far up the altar on a separate section of pews that my shooting positions were a little limited and I already had shot the heck out of them from as many vantage points as I could manage.

I haven't had too much luck with an HDR processed using 3 jpg/tif's derived from a single RAW, either. I could have sworn that I had one somewhere that was ok, but I just looked around and didn't spot it. I'm sticking to a 3 shot bracket at 0,-2,+2. Nikon shooters will get 5 shots at the same bracket: 0,-1,+1,-2,+2 (I don't know what the order is, though).

Good luck with your wedding shoot!

-joe

ImageX Photography

anvilimage wrote: »

I hadn't planned on shooting HDR for this wedding, I just saw the opportunity and grabbed the shot. They were tucked so far up the altar on a separate section of pews that my shooting positions were a little limited and I already had shot the heck out of them from as many vantage points as I could manage.

I haven't had too much luck with an HDR processed using 3 jpg/tif's derived from a single RAW, either. I could have sworn that I had one somewhere that was ok, but I just looked around and didn't spot it. I'm sticking to a 3 shot bracket at 0,-2,+2. Nikon shooters will get 5 shots at the same bracket: 0,-1,+1,-2,+2 (I don't know what the order is, though).

Good luck with your wedding shoot!

-joe

I have my D300s front "Fn" button programmed for bracketing. So, when I feel like doing an HDR shot... it only takes a split second to go into that mode from regular shooting. Then a quick spin of the command dial and I'm back to regular shooting. I definitely want to get some nice HDR shots thrown in to wow her for life.

What kind of lens did you use for that shot?

FYI, I only use 3 bracketed shots for my HDR's. I do -1, 0, +1. Not sure why I haven't tried the 5, 7, or 9 shots that my camera will do. Maybe I'll try at the wedding! Churches do some of the best looking HDRs.... as you well know.

I think Raw to tiffs is really kind of a faux HDR image. Either way, lots of people have problems doing it that way but a few people can make some really amazing shots that way. I can't so I'm quite happy with jpegs!!

Thanks for the well wishes! I'll share some images when the time comes.

anvilimage

I really want a 16-35L, but it's not in the cards right now... Too many other things to buy! I stumbled on an older Sigma 15-30mm f3.5-4.5 for a super good deal and couldn't pass it up. When I switched to full frame, my APS-C specific wide angle was very missed!

-joe