Featured above, is the first public demo of taking what once was a still-only format, and taking it to the motion picture format.

HDR or High Dynamic Range imaging is the process of taking an image twice, once as an underexposure and once over-exposed. The two images are then combined to generate either a surreal rendering of the original subject, or what’s created is the darks and the lights are conjoined in that the image looks almost exactly as if you were looking at it with your own eyes.

When you look at something, say, into the sun; what’s usually seen is the sun, the clouds surrounding, and the foreground. However when one takes a photo of that, the sun is either the point of focus (making everything else a silhouette) or the foreground (which is getting washed out by the sun)

In my time of looking through photos others have done, I’ve noticed one thing; you can either do HDR correctly, or you can do it horribly and give people headaches. There’s no real middle ground there. This is exactly why I take hours and hours going through my photos in the post-process arena.

Now, if you were to stare at this kind of video for more than just a few minutes at a time, you will get a headache, especially if there are people in the shot. How do I know this? After editing 30 or 40 HDR photos in one night, I couldn’t wait to gouge my eyes out and never take another photo for the rest of my life whether or not they turned out good. Also, going through any of the HDR groups on Flickr, you can see exactly why HDR isn’t something that just anyone should pick up.

Artsy folks, go right ahead and do your short YouTube or Vimeo post in HDR. However, video podcasters, vloggers, directors of all sorts, and basically anyone who has the ability to make this kind of decision, please, for the love of everything photogenic, don’t make your short film, feature film, greenlight, whatever in HDR.