With the advent of HDR (High dynamic range) in recent years, the world of photography has quite possibly changed forever.

For the most part it’s a good thing as HDR allows a photographer to faithfully represent a scene and allows the photographer to more than make up for where the camera lacks with exposing on highlights, shadows and midtones all at the same time. There is however the bad side to HDR, the side unfortunately that is quite possibly causing harm to the true art of photography.

Many an unskilled or intermediate photographer has come to rely on HDR as the saving grace for substandard photography and can take the worst shot imaginable and after several hours of manipulating it in Photoshop or their HDR software can knock out a moderately okay looking image.

The sad part is that these types of photographers never develop their skills as a photographer and instead will always be happy with poor exposures simply because they know they can “fix” it later. The even sadder part is that they then pose themselves to the world as professionals and cause a great amount of damage to the industry of photographers who are truly masters at their artform.

I’ve seen so many photographers, both good and bad ones, that have fallen into the HDR trap and I’ve seen the best of the best start relying entirely on the fix it later syndrome and overall this does not bode well for the growth of photography.

Many of these HDR or image blending techniques are motivated as “faithful” representations of the scene because the camera cannot properly capture the dynamic range. While the latter part may be true, the end result of many of these images is nothing near to a faithful representation and instead the photographers get carried away with producing what can only be termed as a piece of graphic art and not really a photograph. Saturation is often pushed to the extreme of extremes, colours are manipulated and often added and the end result is not even a shadow of a “faithful” representation of the scene.

The problem is that not many photographers these days seem to actually LOOK at the scene and pay attention to all the finer details before actually taking one shot. If they did they would quickly be able to look at their finished product and realise it’s nothing like what their eye (with all the dynamic range in the world) actually saw.

Look Before you Click

Love it or hate it, HDR is here to stay but I do hope to see lazy photographers start using it more responsibly in the future and not relying on the “fix it later” syndrome. I also hope to see them stop preaching these bad practices to other beginners because it’s really a case of the blind leading the blind.

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