HDR - Mark's Photography Spot

Photo Trip To The Great Smoky Mountains

May 142013

Hello everybody. After a too long break, I’m hopefully back to regular posting here on the blog. Work has settled down and I have a bit more free time.

I’m getting back to using the camera and we recently took a trip up to Tennessee and Great Smoky Mountains National Park with one of our photography meetup groups, The Decatur Digital Photography Meetup, and spent a few days in the mountains. Both Pam and I took a bunch of images but it was a bit of a challenge because the weather was more stormy than not.

On Friday, we were driving West across the park on Highway 441 when we stopped to photograph the mountains and valleys below us. The sky was threatening rain but the clouds were pretty cool. I decided to braket my shots and do an HDR to see what I could come up with. Here’s the result:

Storm Clouds Over The Smokies

I think it came out pretty good. In fact, I think this is one of the better images I’ve produced

I used a mild HDR effect in Nik’s HDR Efex Pro and am very, very happy with the result.

That night we met for Dinner in Gatlinburg and I shot this sign with my Canon Powershot S95:

Mellow…

The quality of images from this little camera is very nice, and it’s a perfect “carry around” camera. Most of the shots in my Project 365were shot with the Powershot because it was easy to take with me wherever I went

I’m still working on images from the rest of the trip and will post some of the results here in the next few days so stay tuned…

It feels good to be back shooting again. We have some trips planned for this Summer so I hope to be able to get some “keepers”.

The Famous Golden Triangle Of Pittsburgh

City Scene Photographs, Photographs No Responses »

Oct 302012

Pam and I visited Pittsburgh a couple of weeks ago. We spent 4 days visiting my Parents, Brother, Sister-in-law and niece and nephew. In between the family events we got away a couple of times to take some photographs of my hometown. While the weather was fine for visiting family, it wasn’t the best for photography. We got up early one morning to view the sunrise over the city from Mt Washington but there was a fair amount of fog/mist in the air so the images we got weren’t very good. The next day we stopped by the West End Overlook to get a view of the city in the afternoon. The light was pretty flat but overall better than the previous morning. I managed to get a few decent images of Pittsburgh’s famous landmark, The Golden Triangle:

Pittsburgh As Seen From The West End Overlook

The image above is the result of combining three bracketed images in HDR Efex Proand then making a few additional adjustments in Color Efex Pro, mainly to contrast.

The final result came out pretty good but I’m still trying to figure out the best workflow for my HDR images. There are as many different ways of creating images as there are photographers so it might take a while for me to find a workflow that works best for me. I’ll keep working on the process and trying different things. That’s the beauty of digital photography, we can work and re-work our images any number of ways, whenever we want. Once we have a quality original image file (in RAW of course) our options are almost limitless!

Elkay And Oreo

Manmade Objects, Photographs No Responses »

Sep 292012

Elkay and Oreo were always great friends and would follow each other to the ends of the earth:

A Story For The Ages-Elkay And Oreo

Take a good look at the image to see where I got the title. I took this photo this morning when we visited Star Iron & Metals here in Atlanta with the Southeastern Photographic Society Meetup. There were about 40 of us wandering around the property, which is a scrap metal business, taking photos of all kinds of “Rusty and Crusty” things. I spent most of my energy trying out my newly tricked-out camera, courtesy of a software “hack” that I installed a couple of days ago. It gave my Canon T3i a much advanced auto-bracketing feature that works great for HDR shooting. I’ll do a post about it in the next week or so. I used HDR Efex Pro 2 and Color Efex Pro to post-process the image.

Reader Poll Results-Which Sunrise Photo Is Best

Landscape Photographs, Photographs, Photography Equipment No Responses »

Sep 202012

OK, its been a few days since I posted my “Which Photo Is Best” where I asked you to pick your favorite sunrise photo out of three different choices. Thanks to a bunch of you (11 to be exact), we can officially declare a “winner”.

Drumroll please…………………

The winner (by a large margin) of the competition is Sunrise Photo #3! Here is the image that won:

Sunrise Photo #3

How I Processed The Images

As I said in the original post, the three images were just variations of the same basic shot. Now let’s see what I did to create each image, starting with image #1:

Sunrise Photo #1

Image #1 is the result of taking 3 bracketed shots (-2EV, 0EV,+2EV) and combining them into one HDR image using Nik’s HDR Efex Pro 2. I’ve been experimenting with HDR techniques and on this trip I took a lot of bracketed shots, especially when the was a wide range of contrast. This sunrise scene was definitely one of those occasions. I figured that processing the image using HDR might allow me to get both the foreground and the sky exposed better than just one image. I ran the 3 images thru HDR Efex using one of the more neutral landscape settings. I then used Nik’s Color Efex Pro to tweak the image a bit. The result was what you saw in image #1.

Image #2:

Sunrise Photo #2

Sunrise photo image #2 is the result of taking just one of the 3 bracketed images, the “properly exposed” one and tweaking it as best I could to get both the foreground and sky to come out. This was the image that got the least number of votes (2) and that’s what I expected. When compared to the other two images, this one is just “OK”. Nothing really pops in it, despite my best efforts. I think the reason is that having only one image to work with

Image #3 (The winner):

Sunrise Photo #3

Sunrise image #3 was made using the same bracketed images as I used in #1 but I processed them through the “Lightroom Enfuse Plugin” which is a different way of combining multiple images. Many people seem to think this technique produces the most “natural” looking results. And I guess, based on your feedback, you think the same

Compared to image #1 (the HDR) it is a bit brighter and doesn’t have as much texture to it. I think this is a function of how the software combines the images.

My Favorite

Out of the three images I prefer image #1 (the HDR) but only by a little to Image #3. I just think that the end result is closest to what my eye actually saw that day. Both #1 and #3 are much better than #2 and I think it is because they are the end results of merging multiple images shot over a wider range of ecposure, which brings out more detail in a scene like this where there’s a lot of contrast.

What’s The Takeaway

Well, what have we learned by doing this little audience participation experiment?

I think the answer is a few things:

Everybody sees things differently and there is no one “right way” to process an image. In the end, the only thing that matters is if YOU like it.
Merging or combining multiple images shot over a wider range of exposure values can be a great way to bring out more detail in your images, especially if you have a wide range of contrast (dark shadows to bright highlights). There are multiple ways of merging the images and each has its pros and cons.
Photography is supposed to be fun! I try never to forget that. Taking photos and processing them a number of diffeent ways to see what the end result is is one of the things that makes photography fun. As long as you like the end result that’s all that should matter.

Thanks again to everyone who participated. I really appreciate your input and feedback!

I will definite be trying a few different post-processing options on a number of the images I still have to go through from our recent trip and I’ll post the final results over the next week or two.

Happy Shooting!

Greensboro Presbyterian Church

Building Photographs, Photographs, Uncategorized No Responses »

Jul 142012

Back in mid-May we visited some of the small tows along Interstate 20 East of the Atlanta area with other members of the Decatur Digital Photo Meetup. One of those tows was Greensboro, which is the county seat of Greene County. Pam and I wandered through the center of town and came across the Presbyterian Church. The front door was mostly in the shadows but there was some sun mixing in with the shadows. I took 3 bracketed shots and combined them in HDR Efex Pro 2 to get this image:

Greensboro Presbyterian Church

Test Run With HDR Efex Pro 2

Building Photographs, Photographs, Photography Equipment No Responses »

Jul 122012

I have had a little time to play around with the new version of Nik Software’s HDR application, HDR Efex Pro 2, and so far I’m impressed. Granted, I’m not and HDR expert by any means, just a regular photographer who is interested in doing some HDR imaging from time to time.

Here is the “base” image (zero exposure compensation) from a series of three bracketed shots that I took with my Canon S95 while in the drive-thru lane at a Wendy’s (what can I say, I love their burgers! ) near my office:

Base Image-Zero Exposure Compensation

I took the above image at about 1:30 or so in the afternoon so the light was pretty harsh. As you can see, the trees are too dark and the sky is maybe a bit too bright/washed out. You’ll also notice that the image is a little crooked but not too bad considering it was a quick hand-held shot.

This is what the HDR looked like after I had applied one of the “Realistic” presets in HDR Efex Pro 2 and then cropped/straightened the TIFF image in Lightroom:

HDR Output From HDR Efex Pro 2 Using "Realistic" Preset

Total time to do this was about 5 minutes. I didn’t mess around with the presets at all, I just picked one of the standard ones, applied it and went from there. The result is a nice image that brings out some of the details in the trees and really improves the building. The sky is also more defined.

I plan on watching some of the many webinars and instructional videos that Nik makes available in order to learn more about how best to use HDR Efex. As I get to some of the images languishing on my hard drive, I’ll post them here and on Google+ and Flickr.

If you are looking to get into HDR photography, the new version of HDR Efex Pro is a solid contender and deserves to be considered. Stay tuned for more images and maybe even an in-depth review.

Happy Shooting!

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