On top of Bald Mountain

[k9mom]

At an elevation of 2,387 feet, perhaps it should have been more aptly named "Bald Hill" but regardless, an easy hike to its summit yielded sweeping 180-degree views of San Francisco's South Bay. Unfortunately, I picked a day when there happened to be a raging 600-acre wildfire just over the ridge to the south of us in the Santa Cruz mountains, so there was quite a haze hanging over Silicon Valley. I did a lot of tweaking of the RAW files in CS4 to try to work around the haze and I was reasonably happy with the results, but I worry that I might have over-processed them. One thing I did learn from this first attempt at wide-angle landscape photography: Buy a remote shutter release. Even on a quality tripod, the ball head had a just enough play in it to intro camera shake when I pressed the on-camera shutter button. Live and learn, I guess. The other thing I was trying to do was take at the same image at different exposures so I could try some HDR, but I was very disappointed with the results, due to 1) the minute amount of shift due to not having a remote shutter release and, 2) not being able to figure out how to use the free HDR app "Qtpfsgui"...got the photos uploaded and aligned but the results were awful. I know that the HDR artistry is knowing how to make the adjustments in Qtpfsgui but the more I tried messing with the various adjustments, the worse the merged images looked. Maybe someone here can post a Qtpfsgui for Dummies tutorial here for dufusses like me. Anyway, here is one of the day's efforts. Wouldn't mind some critique on composition and how to tweak my camera settings next time to get better results. There are more at my Flickr page in the "Bald Mountain Views" set and they do look best in the largest file size (I've posted the medium image size here, as per the forum rules)...



EXIF:

Camera: Canon EOS 40D
Exposure: 0.013 sec (1/80)
Aperture: f/20.0
Focal Length: 35 mm
Exposure: +0.55
ISO Speed: 100
Exposure Bias: 0 EV
Flash: Off, Did not fire

[mvahed]

hmmm you can use ur timer function in your camera to take a pic without the remote release to avoid camera shake while pressing the button until you get a remote

[k9mom]

Originally Posted by mvahed

hmmm you can use ur timer function in your camera to take a pic without the remote release to avoid camera shake while pressing the button until you get a remote

Yes, that would solve the problem of camera shake due to pressing the shutter button, but that doesn't solve the problem of slight shifts between each exposure of the same image because everytime I hit the shutter button, the play in the ball head would intro a slight shift of frame...so I would end up with four or five images all slightly out of register. A remote shutter release would prevent the ball head from moving at all whereas using the camera's timer would not...

[mvahed]

Originally Posted by k9mom

Yes, that would solve the problem of camera shake due to pressing the shutter button, but that doesn't solve the problem of slight shifts between each exposure of the same image because everytime I hit the shutter button, the play in the ball head would intro a slight shift of frame...so I would end up with four or five images all slightly out of register. A remote shutter release would prevent the ball head from moving at all whereas using the camera's timer would not...

I am not completely sure how exactlly the HDR process works but u can use the bracketing function in the camera therefore eliminating the need to press the shutter release multilple times. Which would prob solve ur problem of camera shake and all images not being the same because the camera will take upto 3 exposures in one press. Hope this helps