Tysons, Virginia
How can HDR help your photography? Shooting early in the morning around sunrise or later in the afternoon near sunset, photography can be very easy. Why fight harsh lighting in your photos? Not only is it easier on your own eyes as you look through the viewfinder, but the lighting is much more flattering for subjects. This includes people and buildings! If you go outside at high noon or whenever the sunlight is the strongest outside, and you will see dark shadows everywhere.
Later in the day, the shadows will change direction giving more dimension to what you are photographing. Unfortunately, some photo assignments are not flexible enough to take advantage of nice golden hour sunlight. Last weekend, the Washington Metro system inaugurated service on its new Silver Line. I was sent to cover the first trains as they pulled into stations after they were open for service. The first trains were expected to go through the new stations between noon and 12:30PM in the afternoon. From when I first stepped out onto the platform, I knew that this was going to be a challenge!
Metro Trains in Tysons
Looking at this photo, you can see that there are very dark shadows underneath the awning with bright sun out on the platform. It was so bright, it was difficult for me to even look at the back of the camera to make some adjustments. Since I was not sure exactly when the first train would be coming by, I did not waste too much time chimping the images. I was shooting at ISO 100, so I knew that there would be a lot of latitude for me to adjust the photos in post. These were easily adjusted by boosting the Shadows slider in Lightroom:
Another solution is to use HDR, high dynamic range, photography to bring out more of the details from the shadows while keeping details in the highlights. I have posted many times about HDR before where I describe how you take a series of images of the same scene at varying exposures. With the HDR software, you combine these images and make adjustments when you are presented with a very high contrast scene. It worked very well here. The first image is one of the single images from the series that I took, and the second is the combined HDR image.
This really helped to solve to problem capturing all the detail of the scene in one image. It was so bright, so usually the shadow detail will be lost. If you try to get the darker areas to be brighter, you will lose detail in the highlights. HDR did take a little more work, but I was happy with how these turned out!
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