What is HDR and how can I use it with a Canon G7?

Question

I'm new to photography so please bear with me. I've seen HDR used quite a few times on sites like Flickr. I would love to learn how to use this but don't know what it is or how I use it with my camera.

Answer 1

It stands for "high dynamic range." What it means is producing a digital image that has a greater dynamic range (the range of values from dark to light) than a single digital image is capable of.

One (slight) disadvantage to digital photography over film is that most digital sensors can't capture the same range of brightnesses all at the same time that many films could. It can be difficult or impossible with digital to make an image that has good detail in the shadows and highlights that aren't blown out to pure white, while still having a full range of tones in between. That's where HDR comes in.

HDR is a post-processing step -- you don't do it in-camera, you do it afterwards in a program that has special features to handle it (like PhotoShop CS). In-camera, what you do is take several exposures -- one where you expose for the shadows (and let the highlights blow out), one exposed for the middle tones (ignoring both shadows and highlights), and one for the highlights (letting the midtones be too dark and the shadows go black). After you save these to the computer, you load them up into PhotoShop's HDR function, and it takes the intended part from each image, producing one image that has good shadow detail, good midtones, and detail in the highlights from your three images.

Yes, you can do it with the G7 -- as long as you get the right software to use on your computer :)
Hope that helped.