well my sunrise mt warning climb got washed out this weekend, so we decided to go and visit the natural arch in the gold coast hinterland instead, heading out super early so that we could catch the glowworm in teh proverbial act ... of glowing...
anyway, it was a good opportunity to play with some HDR.
the pic isn't perfect, and i need to align the images a bit better, but this is definitely something that i'm pretty determined to get down to a fine art.
this is a composite of around 13 images (one for each exposure value on teh meter )
my understanding is somehting likes are super sensitive, and have fantastic contrast ratios when compared to a camera sensor. which mean that our eyes can see more detail in shadow in a high contrast situation. basically the technique i employed (exposure bracketing) takes an even exposure, an over exposed and an under exposed) these three photos when combined correctly using software, give you correst exposure for your shadows and highlights and your main area of focus.
it's a technique i am definitely interested in becoming proficient at.
I took a trip up there last year and did a similar style of shot except I used a mask to remove the burnt out part, slightly different as the outside edge of the cave and water was a little lighter than the rest, might have to find the raws and try this though.
Visited there on way back from Gold Coast in January and did my usual snap-snap-snap handheld 'panoramic' with a standard 300D varying the exposures and framing. A lot quicker than specialised on-site techniques (tripod, pano camera, etc.) but results in a lot of Photoshop work back home! Had to use a bit of artistic licence in a few areas of the picture. The image is attached.
Hope it's not bad form to post additional images on someone else's image thread.
You can also use the dodge tool to fix up that darked area's
yeah, that's my bro, he moved during the exposures...
for processing, i tried it both ways, my first attempt was panorama then hdr, but the hdr software couldn't align the photos and they all came out at slightly different sizes, i tried to manually align them using photoshop, but that didn;t work because of the perspective and curvature and whatnot. my second attempt (the one i've posted) was doen my applying the HDR to all the photos first, then running the results through the panorama software. it seemed to work out alright.
i'm headed back down the coast this afternoon, so i'll be taking a heap more to practise this HDR and panorama processing with.
Photoshop comes with it's own panorama software, The one I took from Q1 is all done in Photoshop, the program does it all, you can also chose how you want them to be displayed; perspective - cylindrical - reposition etc.
Though Cs3 is better for this than cs2 as it has more functions.
)
