Michael James calls himself, "The accidental real estate photographer", but if you have ever seen his work, you'll know that everything has been meticulously planned in advance and there is nothing accidental about it. Michael is self taught and came to photography by way of needing better photos of homes he himself would renovate and resell. Through trial and error Michael created his own workflow using High Dynamic Range Imaging techniques and soon found himself being asked to photograph other´s homes. In 2006, Michael stopped renovating homes and pursued shooting real estate full time.

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This is obvious but essential. As tempting as it may be to shoot free hand (or from the hip),if you want good, sharp HDR images you need to stabilize your camera. Ideally, use a sturdy tripod, or in a pinch, set the camera down on a solid surface.

Second, some of your over exposed frames need to capture shadow details and you may actually be shooting at shutter speeds so long that you can have difficulties holding the camera steady. So in addition to creating problems aligning frames that shifted due to the camera changing position between frames, you may also have frames that are blurry due to long exposure times. These will have a negative affect on the merge process and image sharpness.

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American Toby Marshall says "I can't tell you how many times I cried behind the camera" when he describes covering the earthquake/tsuanmi disaster in Japan last March using HDR photography techniques.

Take a moment to read Marshall's story and see his photos in this article in the Japan Times.

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UNIFIED COLOR ANNOUNCES ADOBE® PHOTOSHOP® LIGHTROOM® 4 SUPPORT

The High Dynamic Range Imaging Experts Offer Full Range of Lightroom® Supported Products

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, CA – April 10, 2012 – Unified Color Technologies announced that its range of award-winning HDR software offerings now support the recently-released Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® 4. Users of the existing lineup of Unified Color Technologies’ true-color HDR solutions can now download the free updates ensuring a seamless roundtrip workflow from Lightroom® 4 to HDR Expose 2 and HDR Express. To download the free updates, users of the respective applications can simply choose the, “Check for updates,” option under the in-program, “Help,” menu.

The engineers at Unified Color have updated HDR Expose 2 and HDR Express to support Lightroom® 4 and tested for full compatibility. HDR Expose 2, a fully-featured 32-bit color editing HDR solution offers batch processing capabilities, user definable presets, and color neutral dodge and burn tools. The entry-level HDR Express automates key aspects of the HDR production process, such as automatic tone mapping and halo elimination to provide a streamlined and very easy-to-follow workflow.

Both HDR Expose 2 and HDR Express also offer complete functionality with Apple’s Aperture software. For more information on Unified Color offerings, to download a trial version or purchase any of the applications, please visit http://www.unifiedcolor.com.

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We found this photo by Terry Eggers to be a great example of how an HDR app like HDR Expose 2 can really benefit your photography even when it's not a true HDR scene. On their recent stock shooting trip to Maui the Eggers decided that a bunch of their images, like this one, would benefit from brightness and contrast adjustments in 32-bit mode to avoid color and contrast shifts.

Photo editing in 32-bit mode is neat. Why lose image data in CS before you have to? We're seeing more and more photographers get their basic brightness and contrast done in HDR Expose 2 or 32 Float v2 and then moving on to 16-bit editing in Photoshop. Try it!

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Our last blog post featured the photography of Terry and Julie Eggers made on their recent trip to the far reaches of China. That post featured photos created in the Haungshan Mountains, a mountain range in southern Anhui province in eastern China. We now present their photos which feature the architecture and people of the region. Many of the shots below, while not true HDR images, were edited in HDR Expose 2 and HDR Express because of those applications great 32-bit handling of delicate colors, brightness and contrast.

Here's Terry:

Q: Can you give us an idea of your trip from an itinerary standpoint?

We decided to fly into Hong Kong via Tokyo because we knew there were some photo opportunities there. We shot there for a couple of days and then started the core of our trip by flying from Hong Kong to Guiling. Guiling served as a base for a number of side trips. One of the trips we made was to an underground cave area. It was remarkable.

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Our globe circling friends, Terry and Julie Eggers just returned from a wonderful 24 day trip deep into China. They traveled through Guilin, Yangshuo, The Yellow Mountains, Beijing and back through Hong Kong. It’s a trip most photographers would like to take for the exotic images and the friendly people.

HDR photography played an important role in their work in China. We were fortunate to obtain a sample of their images during the few days they were home between trips. I also had a chance to chat with Terry about their China trip and we’re going to share that conversation with you in two parts. This first part highlights some nice HDR work in the country’s eastern mountains. Check back with us in a few days for a more cultural look at China.

Q: Can you tell us about the techniques you used for your mountain images?

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We've been reading about this for a while, a camera that captures the entire lightfield. It's from Lytro. Lytro calls the images produced by the camera Living Pictures. And, you can refocus your photo after its taken! Could you employ this in your HDR photography? Let us know!

Focus after the fact.

Since you'll capture the color, intensity, and direction of all the light, you can experience the first major light field capability - focusing after the fact. Focus and re-focus, anywhere in the picture. You can refocus your pictures at anytime.

And focusing after the fact, means no auto-focus motor. No auto-focus motor means no shutter delay. So, capture the moment you meant to capture not the one a shutter-delayed camera captured for you.

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Here's a great look at the image quality of the new Nikon D4 on the C/NET Australia site.

Hands on with the Nikon D4

Since taking the D4 out of its box, it has been our constant photographic companion for the past few days.

How does it stack up so far in our initial tests? Click through to read our impressions of the D4's image quality, as well as what it's like shooting with the camera in real-world situations.

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Every once in a while we run across another way to describe HDR photography. There is the ongoing controversy over whether HDR constitutes real photography. We think HDR is advanced photography.

Here's a great explanation of HDR techniques we found in NDTV Gadgots.

No matter how many people look at a photograph shot using the 'High Dynamic Range' (HDR) technique, there will always be a handful who will challenge its authenticity as a photograph, and claim it to be either a painting or an elaborately photoshopped image. The struggle of convincing people that HDR qualifies as photography has been a long and arduous one, with both sides being supported by prominent figures in the field. The primary bone of contention arises from a lack of understanding of what the HDR technique is, and towards that end, here is a point-by-point break down of the process and its history.

First off, we must clearly understand what the HDR technique entails. When we take a single photograph of a scene, our camera captures a certain amount of color information, a certain amount of brightness information and a certain amount of contrast information. By virtue of the laws of physics, the digital sensor is only capable of capturing a limited amount of information, an amount that is far less than what the human eye can comprehend.

The range of information luminance (combination of color, contrast and brightness) that the camera sensor captures for ONE exposure is called the dynamic range of the sensor. For most modern DSLRs, this number varies between 7 and 11 stops of exposure whereas the eye can easily recognize up to 15 stops of information. However, when speaking of HDR images, we are most concerned with not the luminance information, but in capturing the widest possible gamut of contrast range. While modern day digital sensors have a contrast ratio of up to 2048:1, the human eye's contrast detection ranges from 1024:1 to 16384:1. This large contrast range is what enables us to see the tree leaves as green despite the sun shining from right behind them in a blue sky. Shoot the same scene with a camera and the green of the color will turn black and the sky would go absolutely white.

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