HDR Landscape

[joewatt]

I took this one on an outing recently with my photog buddy to a nearby lake. This time I actually took my tripod with me, so my odds of being able to make a sharp hi res tonemapped image were much greater than normal. This was shot at ISO 100, 1/1000, f3.5, 28mm. I'd welcome some C&C . . . EEK!! I can't remember how to include a photo! Help!

[joewatt]

Here we go:

[Rob Douglas]

Great work. I'm not a big fan of HDR because of the cartoonish look it often produces but this is phenomenal!

[murfdogg645]

Amazing image. I love the sinister feeling the clouds seem to add to the shot... Good work

[Cakey]

love the rays of light..........................superb picture

[FrankMi]

Hi Joe! It's a beautiful composition with an intriguing set of clouds to decorate the often bland sky - a great start for an HDR image. You have also captured the sun’s rays coming through the clouds which add immensely to the scene. You've been careful to not let the foliage get too green, a common side effect of the tonemapping process.

Tonemapping tends to make the sky unrealistically dark and often darkens the darker side of a high contrast line such as where the sky meets the trees and horizon. Here is where you need to determine if the white clouds were actually that black or is some of the darkness in the clouds left over from the tonemapping process. To get a better feel for how close it is to what you actually saw, compare this image to the normal exposure original. If you feel it is a little too dark you can gently blend back in some of the original until it suits your feeling of what it should be.

Overall, the image appears to be a little darker than I would expect for the angle of the sun and lighting conditions but it really comes down to how you like to see the image. That's the neat thing about looking at photography as art, you get to choose what looks best to you.

[cyclebutton]

My first post on the forum

It was an HDR pano - probably a little over HDR'd, but the weather wasn't exactly great and I'd always messed up exposures when doing HDR pano's before.

[murfdogg645]

Cycle- I really like this shot

[cyclebutton]

@ joewatt

I hope i haven't hijacked a thread on my first post! I somehow got the impression that this was an " post HDR landscapes" thread - I'm not sure why now

I like the rays showing through on yours. I've always found HDR more suited to that that non-HDR.

@murfdogg

Thanks. I finally found the exposure lock for this pano!

[Donald]

Joe - A super composition. Those couple of little trees nearest to us make a perfect doorway that we can pass through onto teh water and into the landscape in the distance. Good stuff.

The clouds are a little overcooked for my own taste - but that's me. Your capture of the rays coming through teh clouds in teh distance is wonderful.

Dean - Yeh, we tend to try and avoid posting up images into a thread unless it is a multi-post thread or your posting it up in order to make a point to the original poster and using one of your own images to do that. But given that no-one on CiC gets over-exercised about these sorts of things, then I'm sure Joe isn't going to mind in this instance.

But you should post yours up in its own thread to give people the chance to comment upon it.

[joewatt]

Frank - Thanks for the feedback. I agree with you about the darkness of the clouds and overall. I kind of like the drama that the dark clouds create, but maybe not quite that dark.

I lean toward wanting to use HDR to improve a photograph rather than create something altogether different, although some folks have done the latter very effectively. The sky in my photo was definitely more flat than the the image I put up, but I saw the potential for more visual interest. The sun's rays were a bonus!

Here's another try: