In my most recent additions to the Women With Icons series, you may or may not have noticed that Sofia Plagakis' portrait was a little different. It was "dramatic" or "artsy," as some of my friends called it--more so than some of the other images I've done.

Here's my secret: Sofia Plagakis' portrait was my first foray into high dynamic range imaging. I didn't intend to shoot the image that way; it happened long after-the fact.

Here's why.

For Sofia's portrait (and others I've done), I bracketed widely--capturing various exposures--because the sunset, bright sky, and dim surroundings created a very high-contrast environment. Both digital CCDs and film (especially slide film) have difficulty capturing as broad a range of value as what the eye can see, and so by bracketing I hoped that I could make up for it.

I walked away with scads of RAW files to go through. Carefully examining all the portraits (in Adobe Bridge), I chose the shot I wanted to work with out of all the possibilities, and pulled it into the Camera Raw editor.

Here came the struggle. With the single exposure I had chosen, all the adjusting of the image's brightness, contrast, histogram, and levels, couldn't result in a satisfying image.

As you can see, there wasn't enough interesting information in the sky to warrant having so much of it in the picture. And the ground was a deeply unsatisfying, flat texture. Overall, the image was very "blah."

So I tried something new. I pulled two more shots into my RAW editor--one overexposed (making the ground appear "normal"), and one underexposed (making the sky appear "normal").

The underexposed image--you can see the sky has a great deal of detail, but Sofia's face is too dark.

The overexposed image--the sky is completely blown out, but the bottom half of the image is just about right.

Each of these images on their own, of course, would be just as unsatisfying to me as the first. But here's the trick: for each image, I adjusted the settings in the RAW editor to create similar ranges of value in the areas of the images I was concerned with (sky versus ground).

Then, I took the two images and combined them into a single file, layering the file properly exposed for the sky underneath the file that was properly exposed for the ground. With a little masking, I was in business:

Of course, I'm never completely satisfied with an image until I've tweaked and blended all its parts. A few layers of isolated curve & level-adjustment, and I'm a happy camper:

Now some of you may be thinking, Jocelyn, isn't this whole "high dynamic range" imaging thing a whole buttload of digital cheating? Good question. No, in my opinion, It's not.

My reasoning goes like this: much of the photo manipulation you can achieve in Photoshop is similar to what you encounter in a wet darkroom. Terms like "dodging," "burning," and "masking," were invented in the darkroom, and you'll find them awaiting you in your tools palette. Retouching, combining two images as one, and other sophisticated tricks were also invented in the darkroom. The fact is, manipulating the supposed "reality" of an image is nothing new.

That is not to say that Photoshop doesn't offer any advantages. The number one advantage of Photoshop, in my mind, is that it is FAST.* No darkroom setup, waiting for paper to develop or for prints to wash--it's wonderful to have greater ease of experimentation. And yes, Photoshop itself can go far beyond what one can do in a wet darkroom. But I find that I rarely use more than the basic tools for editing images. Rather, I reserve those tools for illustrative and design purposes, like this image below (one of the square illustrations I did):

So there you have it, folks: a successful foray into high dynamic range imaging and Photoshop geekery.

*Notice that I didn't say "cheap," as well as "fast." The fact of the matter is that Photoshop is a very expensive program, not to mention all of the other tools required to go start-to-finish with digital photography (camera & accessories, computer, and perhaps a printer, maybe more!). In my opinion, digital photography offers a limited (but still significant) cost advantage over traditional photography, but triumphs by way of ease-of-use, rapidity, and portability. More on this in later articles.