HDR from a painter's perspective

This is a painting by Gentile da Fabriano. Fabriano was a master painter who was working at the very beginning of the Renaissance; a master of the so-called 'International Gothic' style. This Nativity, which is now in the Uffizi in Florence, was painted about 1428. As we look at his painting we see that it was created according to a very different aesthetic from that which we are accustomed to now.

It is an aesthetic that emphasizes the artificial nature of a picture; every part of the surface is to be used. Everything is to be articulated. There is a sort of 'horror vacui' in this aesthetic. Fabriano's typical products have a close relationship, for example, to the rug.

And there are corresponding ideas elsewhere in Islamic art as we see in this next picture of the Mihrab in the mosque in Cordoba, Spain.

In this aesthetic empty space is, well, wasted.
In the work of artists like da Fabriano no part of the picture space is emphasized over any other part.

Some artists have this tendency to a very great degree - I would number Albrecht Altdorfer among these. Here is an Altdorfer painted about 1526 which depicts Susannah, the Old Testament heroine, at her bath. It bears an uncanny resemblance to a photograph processed in HDR. In just a moment we're going to see such a photograph.   The eye wanders over the surface of such paintings thoroughly enjoying whatever it comes across.  Altdorfer's delight in the pictorial is so pronounced that we are hard put to it to find Susannah herself (the red-head in the lower left corner whose hair is being combed by the maid). We get the feeling that the title itself is a condescension of later generations. Clearly Susannah's encounter with the elderly lechers is the last thing Altdorfer really cares about.

I encourage you all to look at this in more detail:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Albrecht_Altdorfer_037.jpg

The elderly lechers I mentioned may be seen at the very base of the tree on the far left.

Here is another famous example. 'The Conversion of Saint Paul' by Brueghel (1567). What's remarkable about this and other pictures of this type is the attenuation of the idea of subject. This depicts Saint Paul's famous conversion on the road to Damascus. The subject, Saint Paul himself, is nearly impossible to spot in this painting. If we didn’t know better we would suppose that the figure with the yellow tunic in the right foreground was the real subject.  For lack of a focus the eye wanders around the painting discovering, with some delight, the distant sky and sea, the dark forest, the ragged rocky landscape, the strange lowering clouds in the pass, not to mention the plethora of men and horses, flags, burdens, and the pikes of the soldiers travelling with the Saint.

Let's look at one more picture of this type.

This is another example of the same aesthetic orientation. It is Saint Jerome reading in the wilderness.  This painting is by Giovanni Bellini who painted it late in his life, in 1505. Here the subject is a little more obvious but Bellini's delight in the picture surface is still very apparent. His 'subject' is squeezed into the lower right corner. The eye travels across the picture space discovering rocks, a walled town, a rabbit, and any number of accurately rendered plants.

Now let's look at the same subject rendered in a completely different way...

This is a painting of Saint Jerome in his cell. It was painted by Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi) shortly after 1600. Clearly this painting arose from a very different set of aesthetic conceptions. Here there is no 'horror vacui' - indeed, large parts of the picture space are, we would say, 'seriously underexposed'. Caravaggio was a pioneer of this aesthetic, reacting against the eirenic and serenely pale pastels of the Carracci family.  This darkness is characteristic of all his work; for that reason he and his followers (which include Rembrandt) are referred to as 'tenebristi' or painters 'in the dark method'.  Most of us feel rather more at home with this aesthetic. We are constantly exposed to pictures of this type, both paintings and photographs. They are characterised by being organized around broad areas of overexposure or underexposure.

Such pictures are organized around a specific 'subject'. They have 'emphasis' in a way that the previous pictures do not. Such pictures are always 'about' something. No longer do we experience a continually articulated space as we do with the productions of a da Fabriano, a Brueghel, or an Altdorfer.  No longer does the eye wander around the picture space in a leisurely fashion. The space is organized by vacuums so as to emphasize the artist's intent. It is no accident that Caravaggio was the great propagandist of the Counter-Reformation. Pictures in this aesthetic are meant to instruct; things are too serious to be otherwise.

I propose to refer to these organizing vacuums as 'scotoma' or 'deficits'. When I use these words I mean precisely these light or dark picture vacuum spaces which have organizing intent.

Pictures with a continuously articulated picture space I will call 'Type A' pictures. Pictures which use deficits as their organizing principle I will call 'Type B' pictures. No ordering or relative worth is implied. Altdorfer and da Fabriano were producers of 'Type A' pictures; Caravaggio, Honthorst, Rembrandt and others were producers of 'Type B' pictures.

Let's move these concepts into the world of photography. Here, for example, is a perfectly charming photo of two girls feeding pigeons in St. Mark's Square in Venice.

(http://www.hdrsoft.com/images/stmark/before.html)

There are two organizing principles at work here. The over-exposed sky directs our attention to the lower two-thirds of the picture. And the subjects are wearing orange and yellow clothes which helps to draw our attention to them. A Type B picture, surely.

This picture has now been transformed with HDR to bring out the details in the clouds.

http://www.hdrsoft.com/images/stmark/after.html

It is a very different picture from the foregoing. Now the deficits have been removed. Our eye is still drawn to the orange and yellow-clad girls but our experience of the picture is completely altered. There is no organizing vacuum. Dare I say it? The clouds are even more interesting than the pigeons. This is a Type A picture; one with a continuously articulated picture space.

The moral? Traditional photography produces Type B pictures; they are organized around deficits. 

But HDR has the potential to produce Type A pictures; pictures with a continuously articulated picture surface.

More later.