What is HDR, anyway?

It's crazy that post is 15 years old. Like the OP and this post get at, HDR isn't really a good description of what's happening. HDR often means one or more of at least 3 different things (capture, storage, and presentation). It's just the sticker slapped on advertising.

Things like lens flares, motion blur, film grain, and shallow depth of field are mimicking cameras and not what being there is like--but from a narrative perspective we experience a lot of these things through tv and film. Its visual shorthand. Like Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica copying WWII dogfight footage even though it's less like what it would be like if you were there. High FPS television can feel cheap while 24fps can feel premium and "filmic."

Often those limitations are in place so the experience is consistent for everyone. Games will have you set brightness and contrast--I had friends that would crank everything up to avoid jump scares and to clearly see objects intended to be hidden in shadows. Another reason for consistent presentation is for unfair advantages in multiplayer.

HDR in games would frequently mean clipping highlights and adding bloom. Prior the "HDR" exposure looked rather flat.

It may not be obvious, but film has a visual language. If you look at early film, it wasn't obvious if you cut to something that the audience would understand what was going on. Panning from one object to another implies a connection. It's built on the visual language of still photography (things like rule of thirds, using contrast or color to direct your eye, etc). All directing your eye.

Stereo film has its own limitations that were still being explored. In a regular film, you would do a rack focus to connect something in the foreground to the background. In stereo, when there's a rack focus people don't follow the camera the same way. In regular film, you could show someone's back in the foreground of a shot and cut them off at the waist. In stereo, that looks weird.

When you're presenting something you're always directing where someone is looking--whether its a play, movie, or stereo show. The tools are just adapted for the medium.

I do think it worked way better for movies like Avatar or How to Train Your Dragon and was less impressive for things like rom coms.

> The post never said Adams used HDR. I very carefully chose the words

Hey I’m sorry for criticizing, but I honestly feel like you’re being slightly misleading here. The sentence “What if I told you that analog photographers captured HDR as far back as 1857?” is explicitly claiming that analog photographers use “HDR” capture, and the Ansel Adams sentence that follows appears to be merely a specific example of your claim. The result of the juxtaposition is that the article did in fact claim Adams used HDR, even if you didn’t quite intend to.

I think you’re either misunderstanding me a little, or maybe unaware of some of the context of HDR and its development as a term of art in the computer graphics community. Film’s 12 stops is not really “high” range by HDR standards, and a little exposure latitude isn’t where “HDR” came from. The more important part of HDR was the intent to push toward absolute physical units like luminance. That doesn’t just enable deferred exposure, it enables physical and perceptual processing in ways that aren’t possible with film. It enables calibrated integration with CG simulation that isn’t possible with film. And it enables a much wider rage of exposure push/pull than you can do when going from 12 stops to 8. And of course non-destructive digital deferred exposure at display time is quite different from a print exposure.

Perhaps it’s useful to reflect on the fact that HDR has a counterpart called LDR that’s referring to 8 bits/channel RGB. With analog photography, there is no LDR, thus zero reason to invent the notion of a ‘higher’ range. Higher than what? High relative to what? Analog cameras have exposure control and thus can capture any range you want. There is no ‘high’ range in analog photos, there’s just range. HDR was invented to push against and evolve beyond the de-facto digital practices of the 70s-90s, it is not a statement about what range can be captured by a camera.