Sean went out to Iceland to do a better job than everyone else photographing the volcano. Unclear whether he thinks he succeeded or not given the caveats about the weather and the travel. I’d say he came away with a really, really nice piece. I agree it’s a shame he missed the initial eruption with the fire and the lightning, as I’d like to have seen what he ended up with, although I’m not sure I’d call the stills folks were getting ‘mediocre’. I’m not a professional though.

I’m impressed by the fact that he claims to have used HDR, which is a technique where you take typically three shots of a subject to expose it for highlights, shadows and midtones. Then a piece of software combines the three images into a new single image where everything in the shot is ‘properly’ exposed. You’re artificially increasing the dynamic range – the range between what the camera interprets as pure white and pure black – of the camera, thus the term (H)igh (D)ynamic (R)ange. You want the multiple exposures to be as similar in content as possible otherwise merging them becomes tough for other reasons. If an object such as a cloud is in three different places in three different exposures, merging the images into one then becomes a game of not only getting the exposure correct but then making sure the cloud appears to be in the same place in the final image. The clouds were apparently moving slowly enough that he was able to get three exposures in rapid enough succession that he could merge them. Or otherwise Photoshop them together. Bon.

But in timelapse he’s now taking three images and merging them to create a single frame, then grading them to match all his other HDR’d frames, then taking the resulting HDR’d frames and combining them into a video. Time consuming.

Here’s a brief video on HDR. I’ve not done it personally but I’m familiar with the technique. Nor have I done a timelapse. Speaking of not doing things personally, I need to get out and start doing this stuff rather than making silly posts about it.

HDR is actually tough to do well on it’s own. Forget about then combining thousands of them into a video. I’ve seen a lot of crap HDR shots around the web. Look at the terrible halos around everything. Oh man.