Hugo’s Clock

Clock from the 2011 film Hugo, directed by Martin Scorsese

Situated in a dark corner at the entrance to the galleries at MoMA, is one of the many clocks from the Martin Scorsese film Hugo, rendered in fiberglass. The face of the clock is backlit, while the front is lit by small spots. At first, I reached for my iPhone, then remembered that I had my Canon SD780 IS with me.

After taking a few exposures, finessing the exposure compensation adjustment in the process, I also tried the iPhone. Its HDR function was able to capture the backlit face of the dial without blowing the detail, or underexposing the shadows.The result was better than the Canon, even though the iPhone is only 8MP as opposed to the Canon’s 12, and has a much smaller sensor. But it came at a price; motion blur.

Fortunately, the iPhone captures both a standard exposure, and the HDR one. I always keep the HDR feature on, and so I can always perform this trick:

I open both images in Photoshop, and overlay the HDR atop the standard. Then, I mask out the HDR layer, and paint in the blown-out areas, in this case, the amber face of the clock. The result is the sharpness of the conventional image, and the highlight detail of the HDR.

On the other hand, the Canon image was fairly sharp, having underexposed it to capture the backlit face of the clock. It was quite easy to open up the dark detail in Adobe Camera Raw, but that came at price. resolution-robbing noise. A little touch of noise reduction helped, but when all is said and done, the iPhone image had much better detail in the shadows.

Under more normal conditions, the Canon would probably have produced a better image. But in unpredictable lighting of a museum, the iPhone holds its own.