OK, so the sun hasn’t shown its face in three days and we’ve had almost 6″ of fine powder snow over the weekend. On Friday morning, it was -21 degrees out in the valley! Well, I thought, maybe these conditions are terrible enough to try some HDR using bracketed .RAW shots of the historic Oakland train station.
As you probably know, many HDR images give an interesting bleached out old photo effect with lots of detail. You’ve probably seen this in some recent movies, Saving Private Ryan being the most famous. In movie film, this is known as “Bleach Bypass”. HDR in Photomatix can give a similar feel and appearance in your work.
I was able to set up my D200 on a tripod using the new Tokina 12-24. The meter reading at ISO 400 showed 1/640 second at f9. I metered in manual mode, although the D200 is capable of auto bracketing. I took a series of .RAW (NEF) shots from f5.6 up to f16 all at 1/640. In Photomatix, I merged three of the shots (f5.6, f9 and f16) using the Tone Mapping function. Here’s the result (with a bit of light burning for effect and a few snowflakes thrown in for free)
original .RAW at f9 converted to .JPG
HDR using Photomatix
Here’s a link to the HDR image at a higher resolution.
Photomatix delivers salvation to those difficult shots, PROVIDED THAT YOU BRACKET! The controls in Photomatix also give you a lot of leeway in your results. In fact, you’ll probably spend days trying all of of the options. If you are a purist, stick with CS3 and wait for good light and weather. Gotta’ have that shot and the weather is bad, or pressed for time on a trip, give Photomatix a try. Again, don’t forget to bracket for good HDR.
Just for grins, I converted the HDR to black and white. Cool beans.
HDR converted to B&W in CS3
