Long Exposure HDR Tutorial

In this HDR tutorial, I’m going to share the process I used to capture a recent Long Exposure HDR of the Chicago Nighttime Skyline. It was a challenging yet very fun shoot! I’m also going to try sharing my processing workflow via a video instead of a bunch of screenshots. I hope you enjoy it!

Final Image

Chicago Nighttime Skyline in HDR

Shot Setup

The image was capture from observation deck in top of John Hancock building in downtown Chicago. The building doesn’t allow tripods so I left my trusted Induro tripod behind and intended to use my Joby Gorillapod. The Joby is steady and small thus I was hopeful it wouldn’t catch the attention of security. Unfortunately, I forgot to remove the Induro tripod mount from the bottom of my camera so I was forced to improvise. The next best thing available was my Kata photo bag. I set the bag on the floor and positioned my Canon 7D camera with the camera lens pushed tight as possible to the glass window.

Backpack Tripod

On the flip side, I thankfully remembered to bring my polarizing filter which I adjusted by rotating to remove most of the reflections on the glass. Next, I setup to take the HDR bracketed series of images with my Promote Control advanced shutter release cable. First, I set the camera in Av mode to set my focus and take a meter reading of what my normal exposure would be in the series of bracketed images which resulted in a setting of f8 at 30 seconds. Without the Promote Control device, this would be a show stopper for an HDR bracketed series since Canon cameras will not shoot longer then a 30 second image in a bracketed series. The Promote Control gets around this huge limitation in Canon DSLRs by supporting the ability to shoot the bracketed series in Bulb mode. Since it was so dark, I programmed the Promote Control to take 5 images with 1 stop between and set the normal exposure to 30 seconds which resulted in a bracketed image range of 9sec to 121sec between the first and final fifth image. Then I flipped the camera into Bulb mode and pressed ‘start’ on the the Promote Control to initiate capturing the bracketing series which uses both a USB and shutter cable to control the camera. On the camera settings side, I setup the camera with auto whitebalance, evaluative metering and I switched into manual focus before setting the camera in Bulb mode.

HDR Tools Used

I used the following tools to process the image:

• Adobe Lightroom
• Photomatix Pro 4.0 Beta
• Adobe Photoshop CS5
• Nik Color Efex Pro 3.0

HDR Processing Tutorial

In this video, I’m going to walk through the HDR processing workflow that I used for this image.