Tag: high dynamic range

Old Shack

I found this old shack on a hill, not too far from Crested Butte, Colorado. Actually it’s near Taylor Park Reservoir, situated about equi-distance from Crested Butte, Gunnison, and Buena Vista.
At the time, I was just too lazy to walk up closer so I used a telephoto lens for this shot. The “unplanned” result was this compression of distance, making the clouds look like they’re right on top of the shack.
This is a single-image HDR using Nik HDR Efex Pro.  The processing in HDR Efex is what helped to really bring out all of the texture in the image, especially the clouds.

Fiery Dawn on Snowy Pines

A while back, I was treated to a spectacular, fiery sunrise the morning after a few inches of fresh snow softly coated the pines near home.

Here was a golden opportunity to try out some HDR (High Dynamic Range), using the Nikon D7000.  So far I’ve been thrilled with the results from this camera, finding it to produce very clean images with low noise at reasonable ISO’s.

One of the things I’m really liking is the ability to save settings to two of the positions on the mode dial:  U1 and U2.  I haven’t tried everything but I’m happy to report that you can save your AEB (bracketing) settings and even other positions on the mode dial.  For instance, when I select U1 now, the camera is set to the Aperture Mode and is ready to shoot 3 bracketed images with 2 EV spacing – quick and easy!

Once the images were downloaded, I used Nik’s HDR Efex Pro to create this image. In this case, I was only able to use two of my bracketed images and was surprised and pleased with the result.  HDR Efex Pro is a great addition to the software possibilities available for HDR work and gives you a good number of presets to choose from, plus it has Nik’s proprietary U-Point technology as one of it’s tools.