Photographers almost always use a tripod when doing HDR, and the HDR technique is rarely used with people. In this shot, I went against the norms in both cases. I hand held the camera with a 5-frame HDR sequence, and I photographed three models in a palace in Venice. My Canon 1Dx Mark II shoots at 14 fps, so a 5 frame burst takes about 1/3 second. Photoshop's HDR software is good enough to align the images, but this can only be done with a wide angle lens. Telephotos magnify the scene too much and therefore even the slightest amount of movement between frames can translate into mis-aligned images. The models stood perfectly still, so I was fine on that issue. In this palace, I often allow the windows to blow out because that kind of ethereal lighting adds to the feeling of the 16th century environment. But I wanted to try something different, hence the density you see here in the windows. My settings were f/6.3, 4000 ISO, and I used a 24-105mm lens set to the widest aperture. I had to use a high ISO to make sure the longest shutter speed in the sequence of 5 frames wasn't too slow to blur the image. Note that with an HDR composite, noise -- which is random -- disappears even when using a high ISO. Nevertheless, I applied Neat Image software to deal with any noise that still lingered in the shadows.
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