I have to admit that I do not have a decent camera.

I was about ready to invest in either a Nikon D5100 or a Canon Rebel t3i when I learned about the new breed of mirror-less changeable lens cameras – much smaller and lighter but same picture quality as the DSLRs – and that stopped me dead in my tracks because who wants to buy something old and miss the latest and greatest.

But I really wanted to get my feet wet with HDR, which stands for high dynamic range, and combines several images with different exposures into one with a much higher range between the brightest and the darkest parts of the image. much more than can be done in a single frame.

Modern cameras make this a bit easier but I finally had the cognition again that photographers make photos – not cameras. So, I dug out my old Nikon Coolpix 5400 and started to experiment a bit. This camera actually has a feature called bracketing which is useful for HDR photography.

I had to dig into the manual but found out that the bracketing as implemented works well for the purpose of HDR – I can turn on bracketing to take one frame correctly exposed and then, while holding down the shutter release, four more frames are take at -2, -1, +1 and +2 stops. After taking these five shots the age of the camera shows because it takes 10 to 20 seconds to write all that image data to memory card – a whopping 256 MB CF card.

I use the HDR support in Photoshop CS5 to help me combine the 5 shots into one, and here is an early result – a shot of a house for rent that we are going to take a look at tomorrow.