High Dynamic Range Can Be Like Supersizing Your Soda: Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should

More is sometimes less. High dynamic range can be great for bringing out the details in your photographs’ shadows and highlights, but it can also make them look rather flat, clinical, and lifeless. If you want to give your images impact and emotional depth, consider trying high contrast instead.

As the photo gear we use gets better and better, it’s easy to fall into the trap of equating superior specifications with better photographs. Modern camera bodies and lenses certainly push the envelope of what’s possible when it comes to imaging—combining high resolution while maintaining excellent low-light performance, for example; achieving incredible sharpness across the entire frame; or offering a very broad dynamic range that allows you to get a perfect histogram under a wide range of lighting conditions, with no highlight or shadow clipping.

But while it’s great that your camera can achieve all of these benchmarks, featuring these capabilities front and center in your photography is not necessarily going to improve your images—and in some cases, it may well be to their detriment. Tack-sharp portraits, for example, can often be gritty and unflattering. The clinical performance of some modern lenses can be less appealing from an aesthetic standpoint than the “low performance” look of many older lenses, whose optical shortcomings are often the source of their character and charm.

High dynamic range (HDR) is another feature of modern photo technology that, when used clumsily, can really rob an image of its impact. While it’s great to have the option to bring out the details in the shadows and highlights when you’re processing your images, sacrificing some of these details to create a stronger image can often be a better approach. For most genres of photography, it is about creating interesting images rather than accurate images—and while HDR can make more of the details visible across the tonal range of your frame, it can often lead to images that look flat and lifeless. Flattening the high contrast between the shadows and highlights can mean surrendering a great deal of the wonderful tonal textures that make a photograph visually compelling.

In this entertaining and insightful video from the YouTube channel Yorkshire Photo Walks, English photographer Tom Marsh takes us on a photo walk around some of his favorite locations in the county of Yorkshire—or, as he likes to call it, “God’s own country.” His video starts at a local footpath that was made famous by another English photographer, Bill Brandt, in the 1930s, where Tom pauses to reflect on the very different approach that photographers of that age often took when it comes to the handling of shadows and light. Supported by a wonderful selection of images that highlight (no pun intended) the differences between a high contrast and high dynamic range approach to photography, Tom makes a compelling case for letting the shadows and highlights be—in other words, for foregoing the details in those areas of the frame, even if your camera is capable of capturing them.

As a lover of black and white photography myself, Tom’s video really resonates with me. In many photographs—both black and white and color—the contrast can be an essential visual element that gives an image its impact. Just because our modern cameras can capture details at the extremes of the tonal range doesn’t mean that we should always strive to include them in our final images. In this case, I feel less is definitely more.