HDR Portraits

If you had a chance to read my previous post, then you'll no doubt recognize the subject of this photo as Capt. Jim Yergin who was featured in my shoot with The Nature Conservancy earlier this week. As soon as I had the pleasure of meeting Jim, I just knew that he would make a great subject for a duo-tone portrait. This afternoon, I happened to come across an article in the November issue of Black & White Photography Magazine on HDR Portraits. The image above is an HDR composite of three different exposures of the same photo (one 2 over, one 2 under and one properly exposed) , which were then merged in Photomatix. I then converted the image into a duo-tone in Photoshop. This technique is a very effective way to create gritty portraits if that is the sort of thing you're into. In fact, I could have pushed the contrast of this image even further if I so desired. Although I'm not a big fan of a lot of the HDR work that is currently in vogue, I really love this technique and will probably find a lot of use for it.