Spring Monsoon
©Joe Bridwell
When monsoon season comes to New Mexico, some Sunsets are beyond gorgeous!
These flamboyant colors were captured as high dynamic range (HDR) about 15 minutes after sunset.
©Joe Bridwell
When monsoon season comes to New Mexico, some Sunsets are beyond gorgeous!
These flamboyant colors were captured as high dynamic range (HDR) about 15 minutes after sunset.
HDR Capture
You find a good vantage point, set up your camera on a tripod, attach the remote, set auto exposure bracketing to 5 images (0, -2, -1, +1, and +2), and fire away. In a few seconds, you've taken those 5 exposures.
Of course, you may not be taking simple HDR's. What do I mean by simple?
Last night, a long stretch of clouds 100 miles away caught the dying embers of sunset. To successfully capture the subtle, yet breathtaking beauty, it was also necessary to shoot an HDR panorama. Naturally, that meant collecting five images at one orientation, rotating the camera to leave 25% of image on whichever side you choose rotation, then ultimately combining four or five stacks.
Auto-Stack
Back in the studio, there's a trick which simplifies your HDR workflow. In Lightroom 2, once you've uploaded the images, simply choose Photo> Stacking> Auto-Stack by Capture Time. Then wiggle the slider until you get zero unstacked and whatever number of stacks you had on the CF card. Presto, change-o, your stacks appear in library mode, grid view, as if by magic (shown above).
In this example, although it seems like a flash when taking photos, it looks like each picture takes about a second to shoot. You will want to play around with the slider; in this case, I got 35 stacks and left 1 unstacked. A key to the slider selection is ~ if you can see five pictures selected as a stack (that’s what the camera did), you're probably doing pretty good on your time. You may still have to go through and refine stacks after the split of an airy step.
For Bridge gurus, I suspect you can find the same sort of workflow. Matter of fact, just check out Scott Kelby's Photoshop CS4 book and see if that's not so.
Image Processing
Images processed by Lightroom 2 to Photomatix 3.1.3 using Tone Compressor (default settings). Composite image - 6 sets of 5 HDR images. Panorama created using CS4 (Settings – Cylindrical, Blend Images Together, Vignette Removal, Geometric Distortion Correction). Noise reduction in CS4; color balance in Adobe Camera Raw 5.3.
Enjoy...
You find a good vantage point, set up your camera on a tripod, attach the remote, set auto exposure bracketing to 5 images (0, -2, -1, +1, and +2), and fire away. In a few seconds, you've taken those 5 exposures.
Of course, you may not be taking simple HDR's. What do I mean by simple?
Last night, a long stretch of clouds 100 miles away caught the dying embers of sunset. To successfully capture the subtle, yet breathtaking beauty, it was also necessary to shoot an HDR panorama. Naturally, that meant collecting five images at one orientation, rotating the camera to leave 25% of image on whichever side you choose rotation, then ultimately combining four or five stacks.
Auto-Stack
Back in the studio, there's a trick which simplifies your HDR workflow. In Lightroom 2, once you've uploaded the images, simply choose Photo> Stacking> Auto-Stack by Capture Time. Then wiggle the slider until you get zero unstacked and whatever number of stacks you had on the CF card. Presto, change-o, your stacks appear in library mode, grid view, as if by magic (shown above).
In this example, although it seems like a flash when taking photos, it looks like each picture takes about a second to shoot. You will want to play around with the slider; in this case, I got 35 stacks and left 1 unstacked. A key to the slider selection is ~ if you can see five pictures selected as a stack (that’s what the camera did), you're probably doing pretty good on your time. You may still have to go through and refine stacks after the split of an airy step.
For Bridge gurus, I suspect you can find the same sort of workflow. Matter of fact, just check out Scott Kelby's Photoshop CS4 book and see if that's not so.
Image Processing
Images processed by Lightroom 2 to Photomatix 3.1.3 using Tone Compressor (default settings). Composite image - 6 sets of 5 HDR images. Panorama created using CS4 (Settings – Cylindrical, Blend Images Together, Vignette Removal, Geometric Distortion Correction). Noise reduction in CS4; color balance in Adobe Camera Raw 5.3.
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