Topaz Lake Sunrise, 6:57 am Saturday, January 11
I wasn't satisfied with the single exposures I was getting at this point in the sunrise yesterday, so I combined 3 exposures to produce this result. In a single exposure some of the highlight detail was getting lost in blocks of color, and the foreground rocks were too black as well, so I ran three exposures through Photomatix HDR software to recover the highlight and shadow detail.
Ironically, High Dynamic Range (HDR) software has a reputation for producing low dynamic range images, when heavy-handed use leads to garish images with large solid splotches of color with lost detail. That reputation is not entirely deserved though, since careful use can often result in highlight and shadow detail being improved instead of destroyed.
Exposure and processing details -
Canon 5D Mark III with 16-35mm lens at 24mm focal length
Cokin #121 3-stop graduated neutral density filter
Bracketed exposures of .5, 1.3 and 3.2 seconds, f/16 at ISO 100
Post-processed in Adobe Lightroom 5.2, Photomatix 5.0
White balance was set to 5412. I adjusted exposure, brightness, whites and shadows (contrast, clarity, vibrance, saturation were all left at 0), then I used the Lightroom plug-in from HDRsoft to create an HDR file and transfer a 16-bit TIFF file back to Lightroom.
Topaz Lake Sunrise, 6:57 am Saturday, January 11
I wasn't satisfied with the single exposures I was getting at this point in the sunrise yesterday, so I combined 3 exposures to produce this result. In a single exposure some of the highlight detail was getting lost in blocks of color, and the foreground rocks were too black as well, so I ran three exposures through Photomatix HDR software to recover the highlight and shadow detail.
Ironically, High Dynamic Range (HDR) software has a reputation for producing low dynamic range images, when heavy-handed use leads to garish images with large solid splotches of color with lost detail. That reputation is not entirely deserved though, since careful use can often result in highlight and shadow detail being improved instead of destroyed.
Exposure and processing details -
Canon 5D Mark III with 16-35mm lens at 24mm focal length
Cokin #121 3-stop graduated neutral density filter
Bracketed exposures of .5, 1.3 and 3.2 seconds, f/16 at ISO 100
Post-processed in Adobe Lightroom 5.2, Photomatix 5.0
White balance was set to 5412. I adjusted exposure, brightness, whites and shadows (contrast, clarity, vibrance, saturation were all left at 0), then I used the Lightroom plug-in from HDRsoft to create an HDR file and transfer a 16-bit TIFF file back to Lightroom.