Gorgeous HDR Photos with Canon EOS XTi / 400D + Canon EF-S 10-22mm – Various scenic landscapes taken around Malaysia during Blue Hour.
vedd, the photographer, says:
I normally work with 9 exposures for all of my HDR images, ranging from -4 to +4 EV.
Regarding HDR post-processing:
Well, I shoot RAW when I took the bracketed images and then using DPP to convert it into 16bit TIFFs (somehow I prefer DPP output result more that other RAW converters). Once done, I feed the 16bit TIFFs into Photomatix and tone mapped it. I then saved the tone mapped output as 16bit TIFFs as well and made final touch up in Photoshop CS3. When I'm done with all the touch ups in CS3, then only I converted the images into 8bit Jpegs.
On camera settings:
Actually for 9 exposures I'll be taking 4 sequence of bracketed exposures. This can only be done in Av or Tv mode (but I advice you against using Tv mode – DoF issues). In Av mode, once you've set the AEB, by default it will be at -2 to +2, you can further decrease/increase the EV to -4/+4 by using Ev button. But the downside is that, you'll have redundant exposures at +0, -1 and +1 EV, so I'll be deleting the redundant exposures to save space…
Off course when playing with EV in AEB mode, you need to take special care on the shutter speed – if at +3ev, you're already hitting the 30 second (or 1/4000 second) mark, then there's no point of going to +4EV because the shutter speed will still be at 30 seconds. When this happens I'll be switching to BULB in M mode and calculate the exposure time manually.