Thursday, November 18, 2010

Cypress Trunks, Heron Pond, HDR


This is a good example, I think, of a shot saved by HDR processing.  It was taken near dusk and the light was very flat and kind of sickly.  I liked the composition, but the tonality was just too deadly to make a picture with any punch.  Luckily, I had bracketed the exposures and was able to pull out some detail by processing the shots in Nik HDR Efex using my custom landscape preset.  The colors version of this shot is not very attractive, but the detail was punched up with enough tonal separation to give me a wide range of options for the monochrome conversion in Nik Silver Efex Pro.  The final touch here is a sepia/blue split tone applied in Lightroom 3.  The print looks a bit like charcoal on mylar.

Lens: Nikkor AF 24-85mm f2.8-4 IF 
Camera: Nikon D100
Exposure: ISO 200, 50mm @ f/8 @ 1/6s, Auto WB, tripod, RAW
Lighting: Daylight at dusk
Location: Cache River Natural Area, Heron Pond GPS
Dates: Capture - April 15, 2006, Processing - November 18, 2010
Processing: RAW file in Lightroom 3, Nik HDR Efex, Nik Silver Efex Pro

2 comments:

benjamin gandhi-shepard said...

I think that it look more like a litho print. Nice save!

Preston Page Photography said...

Thanks, Ben. Now that I've been looking at the print for a while, I may have gone too far with the sharpening.