Monday, June 1, 2009

Storm Clouds (HDR)

Last October, I wrote a post talking about HDR or High Dynamic Range photography (you can find it here: HDR PostAt the time, I was using a tutorial for Photoshop CS4, but I was still working in Photoshop CS3.  I was pretty happy with the results and I’ve intended to do more.

Last evening, while driving across the state of Minnesota and nearing home – I noticed some tall thunderheads to the south that were reflecting the setting sun.  Figured that would be a good subject to try another HDR image. 

As you probably know, capturing the image that time of day is a race against time as the light quickly fades.  I found a decent foreground – not exactly what I wanted, but workable and I got down to work.

This particular tutorial works with two images – one exposed for the foreground shadows and one exposed for the highlights… although I shot several at various exposures to have on hand.

As in the previous post – here are the two starting images:

DSC_6399  DSC_6403

Both images shot at ISO 200, f/14, 28mm.  First at 10/16 sec., Second at 1/15 sec.

The final result of the merged images with a little additional tweaking and cropping in Photoshop:

HDR 4x12 logo email 

I’m not entirely sure I am done with this photo – but I thought I’d share.

Hope everyone had a great weekend.

Patrick

1 comment:

  1. and i love the sky in the last shot, it\'s good as it is;) but i\'ve always loved clouds so my opinion doesn\'t count:))but don\'t you get the feeling the sky & the ground are from two different shots? anyway can\'t get my eyes off it:)

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