Sometimes it’s like a brick in the snow

When you’re out photographing your surroundings, and you don’t have a plan (which is always fun) you have to ‘wing it’ at times.  This winter I spent a day outside wondering around and captured this random brick in the snow.  I wasn’t planning on creating a HDR photograph during this small photowalk.  I just wanted to take pictures.

When you come upon a scene that is so bright and so colorful that you want to create a HDR, but you have no cables, there is a simple solution.  In fact, I sometimes do this on purpose just to get myself into the extremely creative mindset.

Steps to a completely manual HDR

1. Put your camera on manual
2. Put your camera on self-timer (2 seconds is enough)
3. Frame, focus and get your main exposure
4. Leave your aperture wherever it is
5. Shoot, then adjust your shutter speed by 1 or 2 stops longer depending on what you want
6. Adjust your shutter speed by 1 or 2 stops shorter depending on what you want
7. Check your histogram after each shot to make sure you got what you need/want

The key is that self timer.  The 2 second timer delay will reduce any shake that you caused when touching the camera before the shutter fires.

Here are the thumbnails of all of the brackets I shot for the brick in the snow photograph.  As you can see I didn’t need many brackets over-exposing but I did need more under.  I made sure that my histogram covered the entire range before calling the shot a success.

Thanks for reading and happy shooting,

Scott