New HDR Shot!

[Jason Hines]

This is a photo I took at a local park here in Scottsdale. Its a 3 bracket exposure, processed with Photomatix and Lightroom. This is one of my few attempts at black and white and I would like any and all opinions, especially and the color. Thanks!

[Kristina09202003]

Wow, What a powerful photo!! Love it!!

[EOBeav]

It's a cool idea, but there's an awful lot of that sky that's blown out. What does your lowest bracketed image look like? My guess is that it's fairly bright.

When I'm doing shots like this, I try to meter one shot for the sky, one for the foreground and one in between. You might end up with a perfect -2, 0, and +2 EV series, but you might not also. It takes some quick camera adjustments to do it manually, especially when clouds are moving, but it can be done.

Keep shooting! I'd like to see more.

[Jason Hines]

Kristina - Thanks for the comment!


EOBeav - You're right! I probably could have used 5 exposures here to capture the low tones a little bit better. I was playing around with the lens flare when I was shooting and I didn't think about it. I decided to process it in sepia and I liked the overall effect of the blown out sky as I thought it was interesting. It's a good lesson to learn and I think I will take a couple extra brackets with low light in the future. Thank you very much for you comment!

[Tzetsin]

I think the shot looks good, even though the sky is blown a bit, I think its ok. HDR is like a woman in makup, more is less, if you notice that its HDR, then its too much. Yours is just right.

I would like to see a little more POP in the forground grass though, What i would try instead of brightening the shot is.... Go back to lightroom with the color version of the pic, scroll down to the BW section, you'll notice that you still have color options there, what these options do well is invert colors, too many dark colors in a spot? no problem, take some of the colors and invert them, thats what i'd do here. if you cant find a color that will invert the forground without inverting other things, you could take a color that isnt in the pic anywhere, use a photo editor like ps and color in the grass that color, doesnt matter if its red, or orange, its going to be black andy white in the end, and lightroom will be able to invert that color to pop it out a tad more.

[EOBeav]

Also, don't be afraid to use just two different brackets in Photomatix. One metered for the sky, one for the foreground. Sometimes using all three gives you a little too much for your money. With skies like this, though, you definitely don't want blown out areas.

[Jason Hines]

Thank you all for your critiques and advice. It's great to have some extra ideas and tools in the toolbox.