 High dynamic range photography and video have been around for a long time. It's a great way to capture a scene where the darkest dark and the brightest bright are more than the latitude of the camera can handle. In a natural scene like a sunset or anytime we have very very bright light and very very dark shadows there's going to be 30, 40, 50 stops between the two areas. HDR works by taking two separate exposures, one that properly exposes the highs, one that properly exposes the darks and then using software and post-production to balance those two things together. I had seen some stuff done in photography that I wanted to try and bring into the video field. This method doesn't necessarily involve changing the exposure of your camera but you wait for the exposure of the scene to change. In this case a sunset you might shoot 10 seconds as the sun setting, 10 seconds just after the sun has set and then you might wait 30 minutes until all the lights have come on and shoot another 10 seconds, take those three clips into post-production and combine them into a scene that never occurred at once but is the combination of the experience of watching a sunset. These HDR images are larger than life, they're hyper real. I really love the effect they give of sort of a dream-like idealistic place that never really occurred but one that we recognize in our memories. So today we're going to look at some of these images, how I shot them, how I combine them in post and how you can get images like this working with your camera. Now it is super critical with this technique that the positioning of your camera doesn't change from shot to shot. If it does they won't line up in post-production and you won't have an image to look at. Of course this creates a problem because you don't necessarily want to hike into the hills or into remote locations with a really heavy tripod. So the solution is this guy, this is a Benro HH100AV hi-hat. It's a 100mm ball head mount but the whole thing weighs just a couple of pounds. It has adjustable feet, can actually extend the legs out somewhat and it gives you a stable, light shooting platform where you can get the most out of whatever you mount on it. I mounted three cameras including the C200 on this and it was just on a pile of rocks so it's really really stable and doesn't take up much room in your backpack when you're hiking out to these remote places to get these shots. We are here in the foothills of Burbank and we're going to do a little bit of nature filmmaking. We have the C200 which is going to be our main camera, pan and 5D Mark III. We're going to shoot on the 24-70. We have the Benro HH100AV hi-hat and the 100mm ball head monitor monitor all this. All this in this bag weighs about 22 pounds so it's not going to be easy but it's not going to be more than I can handle. Right now this is my image. I'm on the 24-70 at 24mm. I get a nice stretch from the sunset all the way across the tree and I'm going to just make sure that when my camera is bubbled up I'm level and I'm going to roll on this. What we'll do is we'll get 20 seconds at different exposures at different times from now as the sun goes down into twilight and then into darkness as the lights come up and we'll take them into Resolve, grade them and then composite them to give us one image that never actually existed. It will be sort of similar to the memory of someone who watched this whole thing take place. So the next advantage of using such a stable shooting platform is this is that I'm able to pen stack cameras on top of it. I have this ball head that I put my 5D Mark III on. It's just going to shoot a normal sea log video for the entire sunset so that's something we can speed up. And then last but not least I have that GoPro that's going to do a stills image time lapse of downtown LA to our left. So we're going to pretty much get a whole panorama of the sunset all at once. Now we're sort of in golden hour. The sun is just going over the horizon. It's a beautiful warm glow on everything. In about 10 minutes we're going to get into blue hour where there's no real directional light but everything is illuminated with this very cool blue tone. After that we're going to get into twilight where the sky is almost universally dark blue and you're going to have all the street lights and car lights and house lights come on. So what I want to do is combine those different moments into one picture. We're going to stick around for another 30 minutes and then slowly walk down the hill with all our gear. Here we are in Da Vinci Resolve. We have three passes that I'm going to use from the three different times. I've done this with up to eight passes but I'm just going to keep it simple for the tutorial. First we have the hill pass which illuminates the foreground here. Then we have the sky pass which I like for the valleys and the sky. The third one is this night time shot with I like the kind of wedge of the sky but the main thing I'm usually going to use it for are these lights. So we're going to put the hill pass here. We only need about 10 seconds of it. We can get rid of the audio. Let me hear the bottom number is how long my clip is so 10 seconds. Then I'm going to put my sky pass on top. If you want to get fancy you can trim that. You could accelerate the sky so that you see the clouds moving but again I'm going to keep it simple for this. And then on top of those I'm going to put the lights of the city. I'm going to hit double you just trim it in. So now I have all three things stacked on top of one another in Da Vinci Resolve. So I'm going to take the top pass first which is my lights and I'm going to set that to lighten. Right away you see I've got now the lights are going over the existing thing. The next thing I'm going to do is go down to my crop and push up this top crop. You see it's starting to bring back my golden sky. So I'm going to have it just over the horizon and then I'm going to push up the softness to about 25 and bring my crop back down again. So all we get, we still get the mist of the valleys. We get our nice sky. So all this is doing is just bringing in some light to the horizon over here and filling in all our great valley lights. Next one is a little trickier because if I click this I want to get detail back into this foreground here and if it was just a simple straight line what I could do is just slide up the bottom here increase my softness and then I'd have this and the valley but because this is an angle I need to get a little trickier. I'm going to go over to my color grading tab and turn on my timeline so that I can see which of these ones I'm grading. I'm going to go to the middle one. I'm going to go to the polygon masking window and I'm going to hit the polygon. Then place it in this bottom corner drag one extra node, two extra nodes get my final node all the way down here. You can see here I just have one sort of thing and I can go over to my window I can bring both the inside and the outside softnesses up to about two. I need to kind of get tricky. I need to right click in this space and say add alpha output then drag the alpha of this to this guy and you actually see I get the reverse of what I want so if I can go over here to my node key and in the key output reverse it. So now I'm getting what I want. I've clipped out just going to adjust this so that it runs along that ridge line leaves the foreground in there so I can go back to my editing tab tab now and I can see something close to what I want with my foreground, mid-ground, and background all eliminated differently. I think the problem here or the reason I'm not 100% happy is the foreground is a little bit the mid-ground is a little bit too saturated I think that's the top one, yep and then the this is a little bit too bright it's too much of a difference between here and here it looks fake. I mean it's going to look a little bit fake but we don't want it to look too fake so I'm going to select my bottom my foreground guy and then just in my in my color things here I'm going to bring down the mid-tones a little bit yep, bring down my blacks even bring down these guys so I've still got detail here that I didn't have before but now it's not quite so big and I'm going to bring in saturation as well so about 40 now the saturation in this guy this top guy was a problem too so it's bringing down saturation of that and you can see my valley starts to look a little more natural then back to my edit channel of inspector and now I have an image that I'm much happier with I have my top pass which is my lights my middle pass which is my valley and my sky and then my foreground pass of the of the shrubs and the tree all together they make a really cool image that's my high dynamic range combined exposure technique please leave your questions in the comments I would love to help anyone else out and I would love to see other people using this and see what you guys come up with I use DaVinci Resolve because it's free you can also do it with Premiere you can do much more sophisticated versions in things like After Effects and the Fusion program that's built within the new Resolve 15 but starting out I would say just get three exposures get the foreground get the sky and then wait and get the lights and add the lights as a luminance or an overlay layer on top of the other two thanks very much for watching thanks to Ben Rowe for the hi-hat and sponsoring this episode leave your questions in the comments and I will see you next time