Dealing with high dynamic range is a very old problem… I was just reading about 19th century photography and came across this 1851 photo by Édouard Baldus (and a different version). He shot multiple paper negatives with different exposures, cut them up and pasted together the best exposed parts.
This one from a glass negative a few years later must be a single exposure and is a lot more contrasty.
While this technique avoids the dreaded halos of bad hdr, the seams between different exposures can be pretty obvious…
9 Likes