Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone: Perfect for HDR iPhoneography

By Wesley Fryer On July 28, 2012 · · 2 Comments

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If you have an iPhone, you need the $2 Pro HDR app. HDR photography (High dynamic range imaging) combines a dark exposure and a light exposure of the same scene to create an picture with far more color depth than a “regular” digital image. Even though my iPhone4 has a built-in camera HDR feature, without a special app I can’t manually adjust brightness, contrast, and other settings which I find essential to take high quality iPhone HDR images.

Today I had an opportunity to visit Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park, and thanks to Pro HDR I was able to take the following images. Anytime a photographic scene has extremely bright elements along with dark elements, it can be well suited for HDR photography. These is particularly true of many landscape scenes. There’s no way I could have captured images in Yellowstone with this much color depth without an HDR photography app.

The main reason an HDR image might not work well in a scene with bright and dark elements is if there significant movement in the frame. In those cases, you may be better off sticking with a ‘standard’ digital image.

Hat tip to Dean Shareski who first alerted me to the Pro HDR app!

If you’d like to learn more about iPhoneography, check out my iPhonography resources page, which also includes an hour long videoconference workshop from December 2011 on iPhoneography.

All my photos from this week’s adventures in Montana and Wyoming including the Discovery Educators Network Summer Institute in Bozeman are available in this Flickr collection.

Technorati Tags: image, iphoneography, photo, hdr

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On this day..

http://twitter.com/Allanahk Allanah King ? ADE

Ah- memories of our tour of Whakarewarewa hot pools in New Zealand- how many years ago?????
http://wfryer.wpengine.com Wesley Fryer

3 years – it was February of 2009! Definitely too long ago, I need to make another trip to NZ and bring my family this time