Melbourne Street Photography – Laneway Cafes – CBD

Melbourne is the food capital of Australia without a doubt, which makes for some cool street photography and a full stomach.

The City of Melbourne crams in as many restaurants and cafes as will allow. Everywhere you turn someone has stuffed a cafe or stand somewhere.

So we decided to head off to some of Melbourne’s cafe laneways in the hope of getting a few interesting images with the trusty D810 and a tripod.

People in one of Melbournes Laneway CafesTo be taking HDR photographs you should “ideally” be using a tripod but in low light situations (as Melbournes Cafe Laneways are) a tripod is a must!

Not only did I want to shoot in High Dynamic Range, but I also wanted to slow the shutter down so that I could capture the movement of people walking around.

However, I didn’t want to slow the camera down so much that the people moving through the laneway appeared as a complete blur in the final image.

There are several methods in taking HDR Images with most modern DSLR Cameras, you can:

1. Simply set your camera to shoot in HDR and take a picture. But with all the DSLR’s I’ve seen so far you may only shoot JPEGs, which excludes RAW.
2. Or you can bracket your shots, which takes several images, each at different exposures. Allowing you to shoot RAW images but creates a bit more work in post-production to combine the various exposures with a photo editing software such as Lightroom or Photoshop.