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HDR Settings on Your Camera

Lesson 3 from: Making and Editing Natural Looking HDR Images: Lightroom CC

Jared Platt

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Lesson Info

3. HDR Settings on Your Camera

Lesson Info

HDR Settings on Your Camera

on the mark to if I want to. Our Sorry, the Mark. Three. If I want to set up those brackets, I'm going to go to my menu and I'm gonna go over to. So there's two ways to do this, by the way. First, there's an HDR mode in many cameras. If I go into the HDR mode, Aiken, tell it how wide I want the exposure 12 or three stops brighter and darker, So if you have a really wide range that you have to capture, then you want to increase those stops. Now, inside of this kind of a mode in the canon, at least you can also tell it to keep all of the images so you'd save all of your image sources rather than just the HDR. So the HDR that you see in camera is going to be a J peg not useful to you at all. It's just to approximate what it's gonna look like when you take it toe light room. But you want to keep all hdr as you want to keep all the images, not the HDR. Only that way, all the raw images stay in the camera when you bring them in delight room, you can work on them if you throw those away. You'...

re just working on a J peg and you're asking a camera to do what a computer should be doing. All right, so what? I'm these air options, but I'm going to give myself more options by going to, um, the menu, and I'm gonna turn off this HDR mode. I don't even want it on, so I'm disabling it because I don't need that HDR mode, and it's less is a little more restrictive then what I want to do. What I want to do is go into the Q menu and inside the Q menu on the mark. Three. There is an exposure meter looking thing right here in the middle, and it says 0123 positive. 123 and negative 123 If I If I choose that little scale and I roll my thumb, I can choose to do 123 exposures at one stop difference or two stops or three stops so I can change how wide that's gonna be. So this is telling me I've got three exposures and it's doing a normal negative One stop and a puss plus one Stop. If I want to change this so that I have mawr of them I'd go to the menu button and then I just have to go and find the There it is bracketing. Okay, So the bracketing sequence, by the way, can be changed as well. So right, normally it comes on as normal and then a minus and a plus version. I prefer to do it as a minus than normal than plus, So you choose it. But it starts at the negative and goes, Bruton gets brighter. Okay, That way you see it in the camera. Going bright, bright, bright, bright, bright, bright. She's just easier to figure out. Onda number of bracketed shots is here. I can you do to So the wider the latitude I need the mawr images I need. So I got to give you a couple rules than the Maurin images you use. The more time will elapse between the 1st 1 in the last one, which means that if there's something that's moving, then you're going to get more movement cause you're gonna get more frames with movement in them. And so then the computer is gonna have to doom or computation to try and figure out which images the right one. But the more images you, so that's the negative side, right? Cause there's movement. And if you're shooting at handheld, which, by the way, you could do handheld hdr. Um, if you doing handheld, you're moving too. And so there's more movement from you, so you want to choose as few as possible in order to eliminate the movement. But the more you choose, the smooth Grady INTs will be the nicer that shadows and the highlights will be. So you get a much nicer image if you have mawr exposures because they can overlap each other. So if if you have a bunch of images that overlap each other by half, you're gonna get a much better exposure than if you just barely but them up like this so that this one covers this third. This one covers this third with a small overlap on. This one covers this third with a small overlap. Not going to get a great Grady in between those overlaps, So if you can cover him like this so that you're really overlapping. Then you're gonna find a much, much nicer grading between all of your images. And then the computer can really do its job. So it's kind of a back and forth between how many and how few to use. If I'm hand holding, I try and do three or two cause I can rapid fire. And another thing that I want to set up the top of the camera is I'll turn this on for you is right here. There's a high speed, um, option for your shutter bursts, so its highest speed, as you can go is better. So if you're gonna hand hold it, you want toe, fire it and get this so that I don't have to keep pushing. I just hold it down and boom, boom, boom. If I'm on a tripod and I have a shutter release cable, I still want to go through those as fast as possible. Click, click, click as fast as possible. But I'll use a shutter release cable to do that. And secondly, if I can, some cameras can. Some cameras can't I want to lock that mirror up because the mirror itself, flipping around like this, causes movement let me show you what that causes. So I just did a little test to see how much movement I got. This is actually sharp, so if I zoom in 100% that's sharp and it's on a tripod. But that is the mirror doing that. So that movement that you see in this statue is 100% from the mirror flipping up. So if you're on a long, this is, uh, what is this? Almost It's 100 and 45 millimeters, so it's not 200. Even that's 100 40. So the longer you're millimeter is, the more of a telescope effect you get, and that movement on that shutter moves the camera slightly and you get this from it, and you're not going to get a good image out of that kind of blur. So if you can lock that shutter or that that mirror up before you shoot on, a lot of times, if you just turn it on to live view mode. So if I just click on this button here and I'm in live view mode the mirrors up and then I can photograph, so lock that mirror up before you shoot HDR if you're on a tripod. If you're not on a tripod in your hand holding it, then you'd better behind holding it at a higher speed. Anyway, this is a 2.5 seconds shutter speed, so it's really feeling the movement. So the other rule then would be if your hand holding or even if you're not, try and get that shutter speed up, asshole I as possible so that the lowest shutter speed that you use when you're photographing is still pretty high. If you could have 1/60 of a second as your higher your lowest shutter speed, that would actually do you very well, both hand holding and on a tripod, so that the trees aren't moving all that much. The grass isn't moving all that much, so you don't get a lot of blur between those because what will happen is it's always changing this shutter. So when you do it when you do a bracketed shot like that, it's not gonna change your aperture. It's not gonna change your eyes, so because those would change the way the photograph looks, it's just going to change the shutter speed. So when we get there. We're looking for the normal normal exposure. I always use the spot meter when I'm doing an HDR. So the spot meter allows me to point at the darkest subject and the brightest subject in the scene. And I can see and initially how why that is. And then I simply choose something in the middle and I lock on to that and say, OK, that's gonna be my middle ground. That's my middle gray. And then I know that the shadow is X number of stops below that and highlights is X number stops above that. And that tells me how wide I really need to go, whether I need to use three or five or seven frames to get the shot done. And again, if I'm hand holding, I'm trying to keep it to two or three shots so that I can quickly burst through them and be done with it.

Ratings and Reviews

JIll C.
 

Though I've already been using Lightroom for HDR's and Panos for a while, I gained some useful insight into techniques and workflow from this course. Jared teaches you what you need to know to make good images without getting too technical. He even showed examples of HDR portraiture, which I would never have attempted.

Shelly Fields
 

Attended a workshop with Jared through AZPPA many years ago. Loved him then, but even more so now. He is a thorough, articulate speaker. I highly recommend him.

user-1c544c
 

Having never used HDR or Panoramic techniques before, this was a great class for me. Jared made the concepts and steps very understandable. I need to get out and try some!!

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