HDR - The Shape of Things To Come

Happy Valentine 2008 Dusty Dusted, originally uploaded by VancouverDoug.

I've become addicted to High Dynamic Range photography. This fascination comes from both the current day results (see above) and because what I create today will be orders of magnitude more awesome 5 years from now.

These days each HDR image I create is a composite of between 7 and 9 regular digital captures bracketed between 0.7 and 1.0 stops. [I use aperture priority to retain the depth of field and have the camera vary the exposure speed.] While this does represent a 50 MByte or higher storage hit to my photo archive for each image I'm like 'yeah, whatever' to the expense. The cost of mass storage continues to drop and I'm quite certain that within 5 years my 1,500 Gigabyte (that's 1.5 terabytes) of storage devoted to my photos and their backups will be contained both within the Internet 'cloud' as well as on a collection of 500 GB solid state flash cards about the size of a credit card.

Here's the deal - the software used to generate HDR images and the hardware (displays, printers and inks) used to present the images has hit critical mass and will be exponentially better, cheaper and faster by 2014. In keeping all of my source images I'm doing what photographers have done for over a century - archive the source material (the negatives or, in HDRs case, the multiple exposures) ready for the next evolution in darkroom chemicals and papers or artificially intelligent HDR compositing.

I can't wait to see what this image is going to look like 5 years from now when I revisit its "digital negatives". Hopefully the second glance and first blush of eroticism in the image will still be there only with something else. What that something else is remains to be, quite literally, seen.