The Basha Kill - Winter Scene HDR

Jason Hermann

Michele and I stopped at the Basha Kill Wildlife preserve on the way home a few days ago. It was freezing but I really liked the amber lighting conditions and brilliant blue sky. So I suited up and grabbed my Canon 5D Mark II and Michele's 40D so I could shoot and film what I was doing so I could share with you all. Unfortunately the footage did not come out However, the images did off the 40D did, so check out the 3 exposure's below. I probably could have gotten away with +1,0,-1, but I went for the 2-stop range of -2,0,+2 instead.

Exif:
Canon 40D
Canon 17-40 f/4 L @ 19mm, f/8, -2, 0, +2


Exp Comp +2

Exp Comp 0

Exp Comp -2

I then put these three exposure's together to create an HDR composite using Photomatix Pro, launching directly from Adobe Lightroom 3. After working the exposure's in Photomatix Pro I save out the file and it re-imported to Lightroom. I then launched Adobe Photoshop CS5 and worked the colors and contrast a bit. I then fixed the dust in the sky and called it a day

Here is the resulting HDR Photograph:



I really didn't care for the shadows on the bottom of the image as although sorta cool, because it's me, it takes away from the image in my opinion. So to make this composition stronger I decided to play with the crop a bit. I was thinking some kind of panoramic like this:



Best,
Jay

eoren1

You did a nice job with the HDR on this Jay
It's interesting because I had an email discussion with a guy who does tons of HDR prior to a winter/snow shoot and he cautioned me on tonemapping images with snow. He noted they often leave the snow looking 'dirty'. Looks like the HDR did give a bit of a gray tint to the ice/snow as well as the clouds. I usually push highlight smoothing to 100 to rid the clouds of that effect and it may work well here for the clouds and ice.
I think I would have left a bit more of the foreground as well to lead the eye along the ice to the mountains in the background.
Thanks for sharing
E


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This is something new I'm trying

Blackwood

Agree regarding the crop. The only thing that I don't like is the clouds. Either they're oversharpened or that's the effect of tone mapping.

Good work.

Jason Hermann

Thanks for the comments guys

E, Your friend is right about the snow, but that is only if you process them in a grungy fashion. I never really do that these days though. It all depends on how you process the raw files in the end. Good call on the crop, I'll try a 1:2.5 instead

Thanks Blackwood Yeah, the clouds are hdr'd.

Jay

hawkeye978

I agree with the tighter crop but I'm wondering if you went too far. I really like the leading line you get from the cracked ice. I wonder how it would look if you cropped just above the shadow.