Playing With HDR (High Dynamic Range) Image

I've been reading travel blogs for a while and their pictures (and their stories as well, of course) have always fascinate me. One particular travel blog that I read on-and-off is Trey Ratcliff's Stuck In Customs. Most of his pictures are utilizing the HDR image technique (Wikipedia).

I read about it the other days and decided to give it a try seeing that it's not terribly difficult and does not require a lot of investment in hardware nor software. 

Hardware

My arsenal, as always, is the sleek Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1. Not too fancy but good enough to do its job. 

Here are the steps I took:

1. Adjust the settings (Shutter Speeds, Aperture, Focus)
2. Set the Auto-Bracketing features and mode
• GF1 can do 3, 5, 7 frames (I chose 5 frames)

Auto-Bracketing Mode in Red Rectangle

Don't forget to push and hold the snap button longer until the camera stops taking pictures.

Software

Since this is just a test, I decided to find free HDR software. Luckily, I found one that is not only free but also easy to use and works well: Picturenaut. Highly recommend it if you're looking for a quick tool to produce HDR images.

One thing that I have not done is to remove the noises from the images. That is not the focus of this exercise.

Without further ado, here are the results (not perfect, but good enough):

I showed them to my wife and she likes them. I think we may found a way to take night scenery pictures using this HDR imaging technique.