Photography: HDR Must Die

{ Life }

August 24, 2006

Now, I hate being curmudgeonly about people’s honest attempts at Art, but I’m increasingly losing patience with the recent fad of HDR (High Dynamic Range) “photographs” that is spreading like a good dose of the clap on Flickr.

It might be technically interesting, there might be more physical colors in the resulting image, it might be all the proverbial rage, but, in my opinion, it looks like unfettered ASS. Seriously, skies that look like early 90s-era Photoshop emboss filters, edges that look like stamped metal, haloes and clouds and exaggerated digital grain–gak. This is the exact opposite of what I think looks good in photos.

I hope this guy doesn’t firebomb my house for saying so, but this is a really particularly hideous example of HDR gone awry.

If you don’t know what HDR is, Wikipedia explains it, a always.

3 Comments

  1. Mark says:

    Ugh, yeah, that photo is really hideous. Looks like an oil painting gone wrong or something for sale out of those like “Keepsake Moments” catalogs.

  2. Mendingo says:

    That’s HDR? How did it end up looking like that?

    I think it looks good, but it’s not really a photo any more, it’s a clever composition abut it certainly doesn’t look realistic any more.

    HDR has its place, for images such as http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e1/San_Francisco_HDR.jpg or http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Old_saint_pauls_2.jpg
    where you can get more info in the photo than you could get without it.

  3. Anonymous says:

    Yes it looks like this junk.

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