Today I've been admiring the work of Mitchell Kanashkevich, specifically his 'Little Tea Shack' photos posted on his blog.
I'm somewhat intrigued at the tonal range he appears to be getting out of his camera (5D), and considered that he may very skillfully use HDR to get such a 'look'.
I noticed that Drew Gardner admits that he now uses HDR in just about all of his shots, see: here, and wondered if this is becoming an industry standard for some portrait photographers?
I tried HDR a while ago, but nearly blinded myself with the monstrosities I conjured up. I was wondering if the portrait photographers here did use HDR, or were able to offer insight into how Mitchell may have achieved his 'look'?
What Drew Gardner describes isn't, strictly speaking, HDR. He is using the techniques of HDR to blend multiple RAW conversions. This is a very useful technique when coupled with strategic layer masking. Typically when people refer to HDR, they are referring to shooting multiple exposures out of the camera--as in 60th, 125th, 250th, and 500th of a second. These images are then overlayed in a program like Photomatix (CS3 has some capabilities, but they are limited). If the different exposures don't align well, you get ghosting and all sorts of challenges to make a good image. This means that you need to reserve your work to tripod mounted cameras and fairly static subjects. Even wind can cause problems for this type of work.
With a medium format camera like the P30 that Drew uses--now I am getting way out of my element when it comes to medium format--I expect that your raw files have far more dynamic range than we normally can express in an 8 bit or 16 bit image. So, by processing the RAW file and then "sandwiching," or combining the resulting conversions of the same original exposure, he can get a wider apparent dynamic range.
He does it well. I am not sure you could practically expect to do multiple exposure HDR with moving subjects...with the possible exception of some compositing of subject over a static background that was shot before or after the person moved into the shot.
