HDRCreme: 'Echo Chamber of Love'

Recently someone on HDRCreme posted a multiple-image HDR photo which depicted a steamboat at its mooring during a sunrise. View it here.

The sky above it was covered with grossly stuttered clouds and the picture was really nothing more than a great illustration of the inescapable pitfalls of multiple image HDR but, nonetheless, the sycophants on HDRCreme fell over themselves to say how great it was; '12 out of 10' was one of the milder examples.  To read all the praise you would have supposed that this photo represented the Second Coming of Ansel Adams.

I, too, wanted to join the fun and so I suggested, in a nice way, that perhaps (just perhaps) the photo wasn't quite as perfect as the claque had declared and that there were one or two tiny points about the photo that ought to be improved.  I did not mention that, in fact, its creator had been grossly sloppy and technically negligent.  I also recommended a  reading (of my own) which would point the original creator of this photo in a helpful direction.

Specifically I said this:

"A perfect example of 'stuttered' clouds. See this: http://sihdr.blogspot.com/2009/11/in-my-recent-statement-at-hdrcreme.html for a technical explanation of how slow objects need to be travelling in order not to have their leading edges reduplicated. This effort is a FAIL. Bob"

Well, then the sky fell in.  I was called names that don't belong in a family blog like this.  I was impeached for daring to criticize the darling of the hour and, reading the furious invective that resulted, you'd think that I had proposed a stiff Federal tax on digital sensors.

Now to say that HDRCreme is crawling with amateurs, sycophants, bullies and boot-lickers is just stating the obvious.  It is the Internet after all. But there's more going on here than just the fury of incompetence when confronted with honest criticism.  What I want to know is this:

How can it be that many people (people who are actually motivated enough to write in and comment on the picture) can look at this picture and rate it at the highest level (HDRCreme is a competitive site) and clearly miss its obvious technical flaws?  More, they act as though this particular picture is as good as HDR can get.

This is a question of real interest.

The people who looked at this picture (including the person who made it) only looked at the boat, loved it, and ignored the rest of the picture.  They literally did not see the flaws because, hey man, who looks at clouds?  In other words the maker used HDR to bring out details in the clouds and then never looked at them.

And the claque on HDRCreme still treats these pictures as though they have subjects and only the subject is important.

But HDR eliminates subjects; it delivers a fully articulated surface and why would we want an articulated surface (i.e., use HDR) unless we wanted to look at it?  Why would we fabricate a subject out of a picture surface that's completely articulated?

This results from what I call 'aesthetic inertia'.  We can only conceive of pictures that have subjects (because for hundreds of years that's what Western art has produced); we have difficulty conceiving of a decorated surface that we enjoy for its own sake.  But our ancestors did not have this difficulty; we've simply lost the habit that's all.  HDR has a lot more in common with Medieval painting and painting before about 1423 than it does to anything produced since.  Now we have a way of creating a completely articulated surface but we're still looking at the resulting pictures with eyes that just extract a portion of the surface as interesting.  This is the way we've been looking at pictures, all pictures, since the Counter Reformation.

It's because of this selective attention, this 'aesthetic inertia', that multiple-image HDR practitioners are able to  fool themselves about the insuperable technical difficulties of their craft.  These drawbacks are many and I've pointed them out before.

1. Inherently limited subject matter.

                (It's a matter of great amusement to me to hear practitioners extol the virtues of multiple image HDR and then complain about how the resulting pictures are only ever of cars, buildings, and machinery.  They literally can't understand that the two are opposite sides of the same coin.)

             

                How will we apply HDR to sports, to candids, to child photography, to portraits, fashion photography, to racing, to action pictures, weddings and even to most landscapes if there's any kind of actual weather involved if all HDR has to be from multiple images?  To suggest that all these areas are off limits to HDR because we can't make moving subjects hold still is just silly.

             

2. Subject Motion.  It's been well said (by me) that multiple-image HDR is like making a movie in which you hope to God that nothing moves.  If multiple-image HDR ever really catches on we'll be going back 100 years to use neck braces on the subjects of portrait photography.

             

3. Confinement to a tripod.  If we're really going to go to all this trouble we really should go back to the 8x10 cameras and have done with it.

4. Overall blurring and fuzziness consequent to misalignment in software.  This is a serious problem for many products of HDR.  As a result there's no way that many HDR pictures could ever be printed.  If the photographer of the Southern Empress had printed his picture first he would have understood what was wrong and he never would have submitted it to HDRCreme.

5. Duplication of leading edges of moving objects.  And, again I recommend this reading (http://sihdr.blogspot.com/2009/11/in-my-recent-statement-at-hdrcreme.html) to those who actually care about HDR.

6. Ghosting and ghosting removal which renders multiple image HDR back into single image HDR anyway.

7. Dishonesty and Subterfuge:

                These insuperable difficulties result in a lot of lying by their makers about how HDR pictures are actually made.  'Multiple-image' photos are, in a lot of cases, really single-image photos.  I won't point the finger (even I don't have that much courage) but I'm not the only one to have noticed many examples on HDRCreme and, par extenso, a lot of other HDR sites.  Hint:  look at some of the most highly resolved outdoor photos which don't show any traces of movement at all. There's one beautiful landscape in particular in which tiny people in the background have no blurring at all (and it's not because of anti-ghosting).  Also look for landscapes in which clouds are razor sharp.  Clouds actually travel surprisingly quickly relative to the time it takes to make multiple

exposures.

             

What we need in the HDR world is honest criticism.  HDR needs critics that will look at the whole picture surface and critique it.  HDR does not need forums for lickspittles who do nothing but praise each others work - 'echo chambers of love' such as HDRCreme.

What we need in the HDR world is more printing of HDR photos by their makers before posting on the web.  Things that look good on the web are very often obvious failures when printed.

I think it would be good if we could abandon the fetish of multiple photo techniques.  Multiple photo HDR creates more problems than it solves.  This wouldn't involve much of a sacrifice because many people who claim to be doing multiple HDR are really practicing single-image HDR anyway.  Either by subterfuge or through the practice of anti-ghosting.  They should come out of the closet.

Most of all: We need to abandon the aesthetics of the recent past and learn to see the entire articulated surface in order to critique it.  Without that HDR will always be just a gimmick.