Cheater Thursday

Nice title... Read on.

The other day when I had the Harley down at South Haven I was going for a good sunset shot. I rode down the normal road to the beach and the sun on the Lighthouse was exactly opposite to what would make a good shot unless of course I was looking for a silhouette which I wasn't. So I went back around to the other side of the channel where another beach was with condo's or rental units facing the beach. I saw a picnic table close to the water that made a great place for my gear and tri-pod. Due to the thick haze, setting sun and grungy looking water the light was really sucky. Ok... lets try the HDR thing and see what happens. I took five exposures all at f/4.0 and ranged from 1/2000-1/200th of a  second. I had my EF70-200 f2.8L IS lens with a 1.4 teleconverter mounted on the 40D.

When I got this images into Lightroom I was even further unimpressed. Well it was time to see what CS3's HDR function could do with it... Not much, but it did give me a place to start. What started out to be a simple HDR became one of my most tweaked photos. I had taken the five shots in portrait orientation and it finally gave me a headache on how to finally crop the image which as you can see I went with a square classic look. Stop Blog...

5 minutes later...

Thinking about that classic look I just jumped back into Lightroom and gave a B&W effect to one of the images and I don't know if it helped or not. It was just one of those yucky days.

Anyhow, now that I have pulled back some of the onion skin you can see that there were people in the image. And yes with five images in the HDR there was plenty of ghosting of people so they all came out of the final product. I thoroughly enjoy shooting people (hope Homeland Security did not just catch that), or should I say photographing people but some times they just get in the way if you know what I mean.

All in all it ended up looking pretty nice... Oh by the way it is not cheating but artistic impression and technique. Cya later... Doug