North State Photography

HDR, High Dynamic Range, photography uses multiple exposures to capture the light in the bright and dark areas of a scene to more accurately reproduce what your eye would see in real life in the photo.

Capturing images can only expose for a small range of what the real world looks like.  In certain cases a normal photograph just doesn’t do the subject justice when viewed on a print or on your computer screen.  Using HDR techniques we can take multiple exposures and merge the images into one that shows off the subject in an almost surreal way.

Here is an example of a single exposure of a sunset at Emerald Isle, NC:

That same shot now in HDR:

That’s a dramatic example but HDR can be used in subtle ways too.  Now, imagine what a little HDR can do for your real-estate photos.

All photographers aim to make good photos.  We talk about shooting clean – trying to get things right in the making of the shot so that there isn’t much, if any, need to tweak the photo after the fact.  We’re not shooting with thousands of dollars of digital equipment to just produce a jpeg file and not edit it.  If we were going to stick with that philosophy we’d be shooting film.

Shooting clean is a fine goal, and one we strive for, but things don’t always go as planned.  We shoot high megapixel RAW images so that we have the ability to correct things after the shot is done.  Things like fixing the white balance, changing the color saturation and exposure just enough to really make the photo pop, removing a blemish that was missed in makeup, taking out a scar that someone doesn’t want, or cleaning up a stray hair on shirt.  Maybe even removing a distracting object from the background or cropping in tighter on just part of the photo.

Here’s an example shot that had most of those issues in it:

Pre-adjustments

That photo looks pretty good and many people would be satisfied with it.  But check out the touched up version for a look at what that post processing time can get you:

post-adjustments

We do post processing work on ALL of our photos.  We want photos that are not just good, but excellent.

Specializing in on location portraits and providing fun and easy shoots designed around what you want the photos to show at affordable prices – welcome to North State Photography based in Raleigh-Durham, NC.