Shooting HDR for Loyola Marymount University Library

I had the pleasure of working with the fine people at Loyola Marymount University. This library they constructed took two years and 150 million dollars to complete. It was truly an amazing and inspiring structure to photograph. Architecture photography is absolutely fascinating to me. Part of the technique I use for architecture is based in HDR -which stands for High Dynamic Range. In order to shoot in HDR, one must take multiple shots of the same image at all different exposures. The darkest exposures reveal all the detail in the highlights while the brightest exposures manifest all the detail in the shadows. The reason why images often don’t turn out how our eye see’s it, is because our eyes pick up a far greater range of tonality, brightness, contrast than a camera. While the human eye picks up 11 stops of tonality, the camera only picks up 4 stops. This is why most candid pictures (and a lot of professional images for that matter) go pure white in the highlights or pure black in the shadows and often times have both! With HDR, you are basically taking multiple shots of the same thing (usually 5-7) at different exposures and then merging them all together in the computer to give you an image that has detail in both the highlights and shadows. This technique is what Ansel Adams perfected long ago and made him so beyond his time. HDR is the perfect solution for seeing detail in the light bulbs or a bright reflection while also seeing detail in the darkest parts of the image. What used to take hours upon hours of tedious prep work on site can now be bypassed and accomplished in post. HDR is the best of all worlds and Im surprised more architecture photographers aren’t taking advantage of this amazing technique. HDR makes the images look more like what we would see with our naked eye, and in that sense, the results are just simply astounding!