Lake Superior Revisited

geospatial_junkie

Taken early in the spring during a fishing trip.

Alcona Cove


Robertsons Cove


Sand River


Agawa Beach

jasonstone

Nice stuff
Love Alcona Cove and Robertsons Cove
Question about Robertsons Cove - that patch of illuminated rocks - was that post processing or was it like that in real life?
Regardless it's a great photo

Awais Yaqub

These are lovely ! i like the effects too

geospatial_junkie

Real life. The sun was behind me and it was filtering through the trees on the point behind me. I find some of best places to shoot during a sunrise are away from the sun. There was long exposure times in this photo (Robertson Cove) ranging from 1/2s to 1/30s. The range of light was that great, hence the HDR range would be really big then.:D

Photos 2 and 4 are an HDR blend in order to bring out the colours and to properly expose the rocks. Luminosoty was set to "High" in Photomatix (anything lower and I find it starts to look ridiculous).

Photos 1 and 3 are straight exposure blends for the foreground only. A graduated colour filter was added on Photo 1 to bring out the yellows of the morning. They tended to come out very washed out in the unfinished product. Photo 3 was an exposure blend for the layered trees only. It was the only way I knew of to do that! Photo 1 is a 42-inch wide panorama. I am thinking of getting it fotofloated...

Photobycate

Great Shots. I love Agawa Beach really striking.

I have an HDR question and that is how do you like using this and is it difficult to learn? I really like what it does for the lighting in a photo as well as the almost 3D effect you can get. I am not an editiing whiz just yet, but your opinion on how and when to use this is appreciated.

Cate

geospatial_junkie wrote:

Real life. The sun was behind me and it was filtering through the trees on the point behind me. I find some of best places to shoot during a sunrise are away from the sun. There was long exposure times in this photo (Robertson Cove) ranging from 1/2s to 1/30s. The range of light was that great, hence the HDR range would be really big then.:D

Photos 2 and 4 are an HDR blend in order to bring out the colours and to properly expose the rocks. Luminosoty was set to "High" in Photomatix (anything lower and I find it starts to look ridiculous).

Photos 1 and 3 are straight exposure blends for the foreground only. A graduated colour filter was added on Photo 1 to bring out the yellows of the morning. They tended to come out very washed out in the unfinished product. Photo 3 was an exposure blend for the layered trees only. It was the only way I knew of to do that! Photo 1 is a 42-inch wide panorama. I am thinking of getting it fotofloated...

jasonstone

fotoflot for sure!
42" - man that would be AWESOME on your wall!!

Oh and HDR for the other person - it rocks - photmatixx makes it so easy too.

Just bracket exposure -2ev,0ev,+2ev and make sure it's on a high enough shutter speed so you don't get significant moving of the camera during the shots (or use a tripod)

and away you go - use the default settings and then tone map it - you can see the tone mapping effect it will have and then post process in Lightroom or Photoshop etc.

Give it a go with the test version of photomatix - ok you get watermarks but it's just to get a feel for the whole thing right

Cheers, Jase
p.s. I really love this photos - keep checking back to take a look at them

jziegler

Very nice, I like the first two best. Wonderful colors in them.

geospatial_junkie

Photobycate,

I can definitely help you out. First thing I will tell you though is that most entry level SLR's only have compensations of 1/2 to 1/3 stops for bracketing. This creates a problem as in most cases, you cannot get the full dynamic range in the photography with this type of bracketing.

For best results, you'll need to shoot in manual mode. For example, my dynamic range of some of these shots were from 1/2s to 1/40s. This allowed me to get full tonality. Bryan Peterson talks about this in his wildlife and landscape photography books. Also I usually merge more than 3 images if possible. The results aren't much better than if I just did 3, but they are better!

Using a tripod is a must as movement can disrupt your images. Also, lots of wind, etc... will affect your shot so you ideally want still conditions (of course, this depends on how good you are a photoshop). A remote shutter release is also something that you may want to look into (or use your timer). This is just another tool that will allow you to be hands-free! By the way, one of the hints I will give you is that when you are using your camera wheel to change shutterspeeds, do it excrutiatingly slow. You would be surprised how much movement just changing the shutterspeed can impart on the camera (especially if you want super sharp photos).

HDR is very interesting to use in the morning as the light constantly changes in the sky. If you use different, long exposures like I was doing and you take your time, then you can very interesting colouring that reflects time over a minute or two.

Sorry, if i am not good at explaining this, but it really is something you'll have to practice with. I have a post in the landscape forum of some funky stuff you can do with HDR (this is in no way a realistic representation), but it is fun to see what you can do with it

http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=99198

Feel free to email me or message me for more info. By the way, if you are wondering which program to use for this; both Photoshop and Photomatix are wonderful. I find Photomatix a little more vibrant with its results and the HDR file generated doesn't seem to need as much sharpening as in Photoshop.