It doesn’t mean that I like the dragons. It is just a technique to capture lights in the night.

The lights are combination of moving cars’ light and lamppost light. They are looks like flying Dragon light in the night sky. Can you count how many dragons in the photo? More than 9, maybe. I say 9 dragons to tell there are many.

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How to capture the Flying Dragons effect? The photo was taken in a moving car. Means you need a driver at first place. Adjust aperture as low you can, so that you won’t see weak light beside the road. Extend the shutter speed to 4 seconds.

The light curves was due to uneven road surface and car moving shake. This awesome effect is 100% original photo without Photoshop.

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If you don’t know what is HDR, read my previous post “HDR Photography at River side” to give you better idea. The method was more “Manual”, it should be easier. How? Read on.

Auto Exposure Bracketing Trick

In fact, AEB should be use to generate image under various exposures. AEB or known as Auto Exposure Bracketing is a trick to force camera take same image with different exposure. Different DSLR model may work differently, suggest you to check out the operation manual. But too bad my Nikon D60 don’t have AEB!

Use AEB if your camera allows. Let’s say camera don’t have AEB and you don’t want to capture same image with previous method, what can you do? We have another method to generate different exposure on the same image.

RAW Image Format

What is RAW image? The name itself explain it is Raw image created by camera’s image sensor without process. Therefore are not ready for edit with bitmap graphic editor or printing.

Open the RAW image and adjust the “Exposure” with the help of Adobe Photoshop Elements 8. Save a copy each for exposure -2, 0, +2. Then generate HDR using Photomatix Pro .

My Two Cents

The fake exposure generate from RAW image has limitation. The quality and color not that satisfied when zoom in. Overall still acceptable. Acceptable means OK only, not that perfect.

Left one is HDR photo, right one is RAW image.

Take a look on the HDR mouse photo generated from RAW image. How you feel? Please give your opinion in the comment below.