How to use iPhone HDR, or: advice I am not qualified to give

With apologies to Richard Murphy.

Extra special note: I am not a photographer. I do not take good photos. But I like taking photos, and as such that places me squarely in the demographic of most other iOS users out there. I wrote this after showing these examples to a number of clients who had this question – to very positive reaction, so I figured I’d save myself the time and just write it up. If the advice here gives you, a professional photographer of fame and talent,an ulcer, I sincerely apologize. Please make sure to write something angry about it and link to this blog, so that I can finally become famous via outrage, the current path to fame du jour. Thank you!

HDR, I’ve found, is a mystery to many people who have an iPhone. The most common emotion seems to be that it makes your built in camera take worse photos slower, which hardly seems like a winning proposition.

First, a word about HDR. In non acronym world, that stands for High Dynamic Range imaging. In non camera savant world, that stands for ‘Takes pictures of the exact same thing at different exposures and combines them for the best possible effect.’ In Things are More Explained World (yes, I am running this right into the ground), what that means is…

Lets start with exposure, or on a more fundamental level, how much light is being used for your photo. In a classic example, if you are taking a picture of someone and they have a window behind them, you end up with two choices. Let enough light in your camera to have their face be illuminated but the window behind them completely blown out (because their back is to the window, their face is in shadow, not to explain the obvious), or restrict the light so the window looks fine but their face looks like the Phantom of the Opera. Obviously, there are a lot of variations and concepts one can go with from there, but you get the idea.

Allright. So. HDR tries to fix this by taking a picture on BOTH settings – where the face has enough light to look good, and where there is less light so the window looks good – and then combine them in such a way that the face stays illuminated and the window looks nice as well. Boom! Magically perfect picture. In theory.

In practice, people generally manually take several pictures and then manually combine them, in ways that can end up looking either amazing, or completely fake and nasty. This can take quite a bit of work – unless, of course, you have an iOS device. In that case you, can just flip a switch and it will start taking three quick snapshots instead of one, combine them, and give you both the regular version and the HDR version.

Of course, because it’s taking three shots instead of one, you pretty much can’t take a photo of anything or anyone that’s moving, or you’ll get a creepy ghost effect. And because Apple (very wisely) is trying to avoid the common super over-saturated and fake look of many HDR photos, they play their exposure mix and matching very safely – to the result that the photos probably aren’t going to look fake, but they also stand a high chance of just looking washed out.

Now that I’ve spent a few paragraphs making you all depressed about using HDR on the iPhone, though, we can move on to when it actually works quite well. Typically, the advice here falls into a couple of categories – outdoor portraits, and landscapes. And those are both true, but generally the result is to get a usable photo, not a really nice one. However, I do feel there is an instance when the HDR on your iPhone can render a photo noticeably superior to the regular shot, and in fact do a better job capturing colors than many point and shoot cameras: cloudy days.

Cloudy days can be hard on us novice photographers. Everything looks washed out and tends to two kinds of tones – light gray, and dark gray. The additional twist is that cloudy days, to the human eye, can actually be incredibly gorgeous. In Alaska, in the summer, the greens are so vibrant as to be unreal, the skies moody and full of character, the flowers still rich and bright. Looking at a photo of that that looks like the world forgot it had color is just a bummer.

This is an evening shot taken on Lazy Mountain, when the sun was just barely coloring the atmosphere. While the colors here do look a little surreal (okay, more than a little), they actually do a much job to how intense the evening was in comparison to the other photo. No really! Notice the slight ghosting effect on the mountain – my hand moved slightly in the wind, and caused that to happen.

lazy mountain sans hdr
lazy mountain with HDR

This photo is an even better example, and pretty much represents what was a spectacularly atmospheric late summer evening in Alaska (um, colorwise. I make no claims as to the quality of the composition or inspiration to the photo whatsoever):

At any rate, next time you’re taking shots outdoors when it’s dark and cloudy, set it to HDR, tap on the screen of your device (to focus it) on one of the lighter portions – it seems to do better if you focus on something midrange, neither the lightest nor darkest portion of the photo. You could also try a separate HDR app like Camera+ or TopCamera. They can create the slightly more surrealistic photos that tend to look hokey, but used judiciously they can also give considerably more pizazz than the built in camera app.

2 thoughts on “How to use iPhone HDR, or: advice I am not qualified to give”

  1. I can’t seem to find more than one way to express myself, Michael, but you really do Express Yourself in an interesting manner.

    These sample photos are an excellent way to explain and involve the interest of anyone who reads this (the old “One picture is worth a thousand words” formula).

    I listened to your radio program, about freedom on the internet, registration of sex abusers…. Sounded good.

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