Cape Town Daily Photo

HDR sunset photo from Woodstock

I don’t often “fiddle” with our daily photos much, but decided this time to try and compile an HDR version of the the spectacular sunset that we had last Wednesday. And, while this is an HDR photo, I didn’t play with the colours and didn’t fiddle with brushes or weird filters to alter the original photos in any way.

If you’re unfamiliar with HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography, give me a moment to explain. Typically, when humans look at high-contrast scenes (like sunsets) our eyes adjust so quickly that we’re able to see detail in a huge amount of contrast – from the very bright sun dipping below the horizon, to the dark shadows caused by mountains, buildings and other obstacles.

HDR photos are typically composed of three or more photos of exactly the same scene, taken one after the other from exactly the same position, only at different exposures – meaning that one photo will be really dark (underexposed), one will be really bright (overexposed) and one will be properly exposed.

One then uses software to merge the three (or more) photos into a single picture that typically takes the best from all three photos and combines them into a single photo. My photo above got a little out of hand (with the eerie-looking shadows creeping along the road and down from Devil’s Peak) ending up looking perhaps like the scene belongs more in a movie about demons and vampires.

PS. I promise, there are no vampires in Cape Town. Demons, however – there are plenty – we’ve been battling several of them at work in the last week!