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"HDR is disgusting and it needs to die, it's worse than lens flares."

What should be the fate of the HDR?

  • Death. Show no mercy. HDR needs to die.

    Votes: 72 31.6%

  • HDR is great photography. It shouldn't go.

    Votes: 156 68.4%
  • Total voters
    228
dweezle3 said:
Wow, you do realize he was actually being nice to you, right? A lot of your photos really do look tone mapped and what is there to distinguish a telephoto shot from a wide angle when you're so far away from the subject? You could stand a mile away from those mountains and zoom in with a telephoto to get the same shot that you could with a wide angle from much closer. And I know there'd obviously be some differences between two photos like that, but seeing how heavily edited your pictures are, I assume you could remedy those differences easily enough.
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No he wasn't. Unless you think that "damning with the faintest of praise" is "being nice". This is what HDR does: it makes photographers forget that there are any other ways of taking - or assembling - a photograph. The light can create subtle, nuanced effects... and all you have to do to capture it is to be in the right place at the right time and have an eye for a picture. Oh, and some skill and maybe some patience too... ;)

This is what Phrasikleia's pix demonstrate. She obviously gets to some very photogenic places (and clear mountain air is helpful), but that's just the beginning of getting a pic that captures 'what's there'. It's about looking and waiting, and getting a real sense of your surroundings. HDR, on the other hand, is just trying to make the best of a bad job. If a pic doesn't look very interesting as you stare through the viewfinder, maybe look beyond a simplistic software solution... and think a little harder about what goes into a really telling image...
 
Doylem said:
It's about looking and waiting, and getting a real sense of your surroundings. HDR, on the other hand, is just trying to make the best of a bad job.
Click to expand...

I've always thought HDR was about enhancing an already good picture? Of course you can make amazing pictures without HDR, but, applied correctly, HDR can really enhance a scene and bring out the subtle and nuanced effects of lighting that just aren't possible to see in just a plain photograph. I understand what you're saying, but there really is more than just that stereotypical, gaudy, overbaked HDR out there.

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Doylem said:
No he wasn't.
Click to expand...

"your work is much, much better than any of mine"
"I just looked at your gallery, which is excellent"
"great subjects and compositions"
"They're all very good"
"...would elevate what you're doing, which is already very good"
"the trend is constructive criticism"

Sounds like he's being nice to me....
 
Phrasikleia said:
Policar, you're kidding, right? I don't even own an HDR program, none of my photos are "tone mapped," they are almost exclusively single-exposure compositions, and at least half of them were shot with a telephoto lens.
Click to expand...

Then I look like a fool here and maybe it's just a bit too much dodging and burning for my taste, or the skies are just a bit too dim for me to believe the light. Are you sure you didn't use a grad filter or something on some of these? Anyhow, very, very nice gallery overall.

Where'd you take the Wanderlust shot?

Doylem said:
No he wasn't. Unless you think that "damning with the faintest of praise" is "being nice".
Click to expand...


Doylem, damning with faint praise? I said her photos didn't quite have the natural tonality of Ansel Adams' prints for god sake and could have stood on their own without as much dodging and burning or the use of ND grad filters or whatever it is that results in the skies being a bit too dark to be believable. As criticisms go, that's as nice as it gets. If you call saying "these are way better than anything I've taken" faint praise, it's obviously because you think the photos I posted here so so bad that "way better than that" is terrible, too, and that's just being mean. So don't call me out for posting my opinion as "faint praise" when you're leveling underhanded insults like that and refusing to offer any criticism to anyone here because you feel you're above it. You've had this condescending better-than-thou attitude throughout this thread and have shown nothing for it at all.
 
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HDR; a great way to ruin your vacation photos.

IMG_4711_2_3_tonemapped.jpg



Good photography;
%E3%82%B9%E3%82%AF%E3%83%AA%E3%83%BC%E3%83%B3%E3%82%B7%E3%83%A7%E3%83%83%E3%83%88%EF%BC%882012-09-16%2016.05.41%EF%BC%89.png
 
zhandri said:
most good photographers really like the idea of doing HDR pictures.
Click to expand...

Not true.

If you were to attend Look3, Perpignan, walk into ICP in New York or National Geographic and say that, you would find out you are wrong. It takes real talent to know light well enough to fit those convergences into a single frame, not HDR.

Personally, there are very few if any HDR images I like, most look like 1970's "Keep On Truck'n" glow in the dark posters, utter garbage. Because of the influx of this and other types of flickr-tastic garbage, I have pulled down my sites for straight gallery representation, mostly dumped digital after using it for 20 years and now make big+ money shooting all fine art on black and white 120 and 4x5 film and hand printing it in a real darkroom. Just this year alone I have invested about 18K in film paper and chemistry to get me by for over 10 years incase things get weird out there.

But HDR in my work...?...not if you paid me a million a year...
 
macnerd93 said:
If my photos were as you say "Tacky" they wouldn't get all the positive feedback that they get now would they or my work wouldn't have been exhibited now would it?
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That positive feedback would not have happened to have been on the web would it? Because if it was, then I am sorry to break it to you but it hardly counts. You see, there is a phenomenon that has been going on some time called the "Back Patting Circles" in which a photo, or in your case, a graphic illustration is posted on flickr and is awarded tons of oooze by people who would love to get the same from you. There is rarely any critique and it has lowered the bar to what actually *IS* a good photograph considerably on the web at least.

But if you were to show these illustrations to say, a well known photographer who teaches workshops, some of the better galleries in the world and some of the better reps in the world...they would call it tacky computer art.
 
Macshroomer said:
Not true.

If you were to attend Look3, Perpignan, walk into ICP in New York or National Geographic and say that, you would find out you are wrong. It takes real talent to know light well enough to fit those convergences into a single frame, not HDR.

Personally, there are very few if any HDR images I like, most look like 1970's "Keep On Truck'n" glow in the dark posters, utter garbage. Because of the influx of this and other types of flickr-tastic garbage, I have pulled down my sites for straight gallery representation, mostly dumped digital after using it for 20 years and now make big+ money shooting all fine art on black and white 120 and 4x5 film and hand printing it in a real darkroom. Just this year alone I have invested about 18K in film paper and chemistry to get me by for over 10 years incase things get weird out there.

But HDR in my work...?...not if you paid me a million a year...
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ok my whole family is in the photography business and you want to tell me something.... ok get your facts straight

i think most people here don't even know what a real HDR image is and i guess so many big companies are now using HDR images because they are so bad...
 
Macshroomer said:
But HDR in my work...?...not if you paid me a million a year...
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I don't know, a million dollars a year sounds like quite a deal :rolleyes: I think that a moderate use of HDR wouldn't be a bad thing though, Ansel Adams certainly experimented all the time with HDR-like techniques like dodging and burning with his photography....
 
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To me it's the same as playing with Contrast in a B&W or dropshadows with text for the first time. If you're lucky, you realize it's fringe and not meant to be a basis of skill. Anyone can click merge to hdr pro.
 
kawikao said:
Anyone can click merge to hdr pro.
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But not everyone can fine tune those settings to make a reasonable photo out of it, and then edit it further in Photoshop or Aperture or whatnot to make a great photo out of it. Clicking a magical "Make this photo into an HDR for me" isn't what HDR processing is all about. Like you said, anyone can do that. However, not many people at all can make a really good HDR image, as is evidenced by the sheer amount of terribly garish examples in this thread.
 
I agree, it sucks.
I do like camera's with HDR sensors though, like the D800. It captures almost 15 stops of light, more than most HDR programs grab with software and 2-3 frames. In the D800 it gives a very natural look with awesome shadow and highlight detail. And just one picture to be taken.

Oh, and that second temple sucks too. It was taken with a crappy lens with almost 3 stops of vignetting. Which brings me to the next poll suggestion: Post process vignetting must die!
And fckdp use of Tilt lenses must die AKA Fake Miniatures Must Die!. A TILT LENS IS TO GET EVERYTHING IN AN ANGLED PLANE IN FOCUS. NOTHING ELSE!
 
dweezle3 said:
But not everyone can fine tune those settings to make a reasonable photo out of it, and then edit it further in Photoshop or Aperture or whatnot to make a great photo out of it. Clicking a magical "Make this photo into an HDR for me" isn't what HDR processing is all about. Like you said, anyone can do that. However, not many people at all can make a really good HDR image, as is evidenced by the sheer amount of terribly garish examples in this thread.
Click to expand...

Well said. I really hope those who don't know the tools go back to doing whatever it is they do and let the people who spend the time to learn the craft do their stuff. Cheers

----------
blanka said:
I agree, it sucks.
I do like camera's with HDR sensors though, like the D800. It captures almost 15 stops of light, more than most HDR programs grab with software and 2-3 frames. In the D800 it gives a very natural look with awesome shadow and highlight detail. And just one picture to be taken.
Click to expand...

I have a D800 and I messed with the HDR briefly but I don't have the eye to hand coordination to make a good image yet and may never have it. The files are huge though. :) Cheers
 
kawikao said:
I have a D800 and I messed with the HDR briefly but I don't have the eye to hand coordination to make a good image yet and may never have it. The files are huge though. :) Cheers
Click to expand...

The D800 does HDR in a single shot. You don't have to use any "FUNCTION" for it, it just works like that standard. It captures 14.5 stops of light, about the same a 5DmkIII pulls out of a 2 shot stacked image 3 stops apart. And it looks natural out of the box.
 
blanka said:
Post process vignetting must die!
And fckdp use of Tilt lenses must die AKA Fake Miniatures Must Die!. A TILT LENS IS TO GET EVERYTHING IN AN ANGLED PLANE IN FOCUS. NOTHING ELSE!
Click to expand...

Haha that's quite a reaction! Had a bit too much coffee, did we? ;) I've always been really interested in tilt shift lenses though! Having never owned one myself, I've considered getting one for a while now, but I've actually never thought about buying one for the sole purpose of getting an angled plane in focus, even though that's what they were intended to do. Fake miniatures are just so much fun! Of course it's completely a personal preference thing, like HDR is, but I think that creatively using a lens outside of it's designed capacity is a great idea! Although seeing as how that's the main thing I would use it for, I can't quite justify paying for one when I can create the same effect in post....
 
Just go grab yourself a 85mm PCE... You will be astonished. If you start using tilted focus planes for product photography, you can do a trick almost no-one can (check how many out of focus angled smartphone pictures there are on Engadget and co! With a PCE, no need to make photo's that crap).
And for 100$ more than the "holy" 85mm 1.4 ASF, you also get a lens that makes a tosti of the "holy's" portraits: they are even sharper with even nicer bokeh. Even Leica will be impressed by its portraits.
 
Macshroomer said:
Not true.

If you were to attend Look3, Perpignan, walk into ICP in New York or National Geographic and say that, you would find out you are wrong. It takes real talent to know light well enough to fit those convergences into a single frame, not HDR.

Personally, there are very few if any HDR images I like, most look like 1970's "Keep On Truck'n" glow in the dark posters, utter garbage. Because of the influx of this and other types of flickr-tastic garbage, I have pulled down my sites for straight gallery representation, mostly dumped digital after using it for 20 years and now make big+ money shooting all fine art on black and white 120 and 4x5 film and hand printing it in a real darkroom. Just this year alone I have invested about 18K in film paper and chemistry to get me by for over 10 years incase things get weird out there.

But HDR in my work...?...not if you paid me a million a year...
Click to expand...

HA for a million a year I'd work on a PC and listen to Justin Fever all day. I haven't read the whole thread nor do I know you, but you sound like a film purist. Don't let that cloud your view on other ways to do the art of photography...your opinion is fine but you come across as a bit arrogant that only your way is the right way.

And what's wrong with capturing a scene in a single frame or an HDR? Its an art. Do it as you please and don't look down on those who choose so it differently.

Macshroomer said:
That positive feedback would not have happened to have been on the web would it? Because if it was, then I am sorry to break it to you but it hardly counts. You see, there is a phenomenon that has been going on some time called the "Back Patting Circles" in which a photo, or in your case, a graphic illustration is posted on flickr and is awarded tons of oooze by people who would love to get the same from you. There is rarely any critique and it has lowered the bar to what actually *IS* a good photograph considerably on the web at least.

But if you were to show these illustrations to say, a well known photographer who teaches workshops, some of the better galleries in the world and some of the better reps in the world...they would call it tacky computer art.
Click to expand...

Again art is art. Everyone has an opinion. No matter how famous someone is or not. What matters more? The opinion of a famous photographer or the opinion of your client who may pay you for that "crappy HDR photo?" I couldnt careless what some "good photographer" thinks...if I like it then that's good enough for me...to each his own.
 
Just wanted to share these two photos, show last year on an iPhone 4, one is without HDR, the other with. In this instance I think HDR absolutely added to the photo!

No prizes for guessing which was which.
 

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MyRomeo said:
Just wanted to share these two photos, show last year on an iPhone 4, one is without HDR, the other with. In this instance I think HDR absolutely added to the photo!

No prizes for guessing which was which.
Click to expand...

That is not HDR: The first is a crappy image clipped beyond usability thanks to a dramatic D-range, probably 5-6 stops. The second is an underexposed image with a 8-10 stop d-range every DSLR is capable off at ISO 400-800. If you had a D800, a standard image (14+ stops) would have an even better D-range by default, making the grass much lighter with even more detail in the clouds than the second image.
 
Having met Trey Ratcliff in person the other night, I'm a bit embarassed to be part of this discussion. (Although my thoughts are still the same. :p)
 
I guess I fall in line with most people on the forum. End the freakin' vomit saturated tonemaping and edge glow. Next be mindful of the dynamic range. If you try to fit 30 stops of DR on a computer screen it looks fake. Shadows should be dark and highlights should be bright...

I don't see anything wrong with taking several pictures to enhance the dynamic range of your camera. However, it can be hard to get a balanced end result.

To the purists, shooting with a graduated filter is HDR so I don't get why you're getting your panties in a bunch...
 
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