HDR Photography

• Mid-century
Mid-century, manual tone mapping was particularly done using dodging and burning – selectively increasing or decreasing the exposure of regions of the photograph to yield better tonality reproduction. An excellent example is the photograph "Schweitzer at the Lamp" by W. Eugene Smith, from his 1954 photo essay A Man of Mercy on Dr. Albert Schweitzer and his humanitarian work in French Equatorial Africa. The image took 5 days to produce, in order to reproduce the tonal range of the scene, which ranges from a bright lamp (relative to the scene) to a dark shadow.
Ansel Adams elevated dodging and burning to an art form. Many of his famous prints were manipulated in the darkroom with these two techniques. Adams wrote a comprehensive book on producing prints called The Print, which features dodging and burning prominently, in the context of his Zone System.
With the advent of color photography, tone mapping in the darkroom was no longer possible, due to the specific timing required during the developing process of color film. Photographers looked to film manufacturers to design new film stocks with improved response over the years, or shot in black and white to use tone-mapping techniques.