High dynamic range imaging

All images in this post are by Cypher One. Visit his Flickr area to view gorgeous hi-res versions of these and other images.

Talk of HDD photography has been bouncing round the internet for a while now, the examples I’d seen of it were intriguing, but they didn’t move me particularly. The illustrations in the Wikipedia entry would leave most people scratching their head. Then I followed the BoingBoing entry about the derelict Taiwanese ‘space apartments’, pictured above. Quite apart from their post-production treatment, these images are beautifully shot and riddled with the pathos of lost futures. However the HDD technique suffuses them with something breathtaking: there’s a richness and depth that others have called painterly (though I’m not fond of that description). This is perhaps best illustrated by another of Cypher One’s photographs taken of a more workaday subject:

The fascination of these pictures comes, for me, from their folding of multiple timeframes into one image – except that folding isn’t quite right, the slight blurring and the strange play of colours and textures implies the passage of time in a very involving, subtle way.