Rather than what one might expect, the most important thing to make a HDR is doing a good shoot, the distinctiveness of an image created with this technique is not only achieved with a good post-processing but with photography itself.

So, in order to capture an image that would be a good HDR photo, we have to imagine it at the end of the editing process. For this reason surreal or melancholy shots are preferred. I highly recommend not to take photographs in the hours when the sun is high, rather prefer the early hours of the day or the sunset, when the light is constantly changing and when you can take the full details of the clouds in the sky.

To shooting HDR try to be as accurate as possible, the more clean you are, the few will be the differences between images and the more your HDR will have the desired effect.

For this reason it is very important to use the camera in aperture priority, the camera in this way during the bracketing overexpose / underexpose adjusting shutter time your “imposition” of the diaphragm and in this way will keep unchanged the depth of field (DoF) on all shots.

I recommend the “quality” and “cleaning” of images taken, for this reason shoot in RAW mode to capture the widest dynamic range possible. As regards instead the “cleaning” of the picture would be good to shoot with low ISO (possibly 100) and the lowering of all the other settings that can create noise in the shots.

What you need to shooting HDR:

1. A camera that allows shooting in bracketing mode. With this feature you can set the number of shots you want and the variation of exposure between the images. You can clearly make this series of shots even without this feature but you could run the risk of moving the camera with the result that the image is moved.

2. A tripod to avoid blur the micro, if there is movement, it will result in a blurry HDR

3. A remote controller to avoid interacting on camera manually.

How to set the camera to shoot a HDR:


1. Set on aperture priority (A)

2. Set shooting mode RAW

3. Set 3 shots from the camera using bracketing, I personally prefer to use only 3 shots.

Once you choose what to shoot, you will have 3 images:

The first image should be a regular shot, don’t worry about adjusting the exposure of this picture. The important thing  in this image is to get an even amount of light.

The second image should be darker than the first so adjust your exposure to make it darker. Getting this image darker allow you to bring out the colors in the bright areas of the image.

The third image should be brighter than the first two so adjust your exposure to make it brighter. This exposure will affect the foreground image and the details in the dark areas of the photo.