HDR Photography: Remembering Larkspur's World

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Remembering this post:

Borek said:
I have found this guy accidentally.

http://www.panoramio.com/user/109117

As someone said about Larkspur - I would like to live in the world as he sees it.

Larkspurs pictures are always so rich on color, almost too saturated but especially the dynamic range from light to dark are so well balanced. Too bad she doesn't drop by anymore.

So I want to live in that world too and I was going over all my summer pics, like this one:

A woman in a white ruffled top and long white skirt sits on a rock in a grassy hillside, gazing toward misty valleys and distant blue mountains under a pale pink dawn sky.


That's the whole frame, straight from the RAW file, no corrections. The idea was to try and get a Maxfield Parish kind of lighting, shooting straigt into the morn ing sun.

Maybe not bad, but nowhere near Larkspur's world. The dynamic range of the subject is too much to capture in full. We need something with High Dynamic Ranging, together with some color managing to improve that.

HDR is usually done with several pictures -at least three-, identical except for different exposures. However not a lot of models freeze for several pix and a tripod is not always practicable, but we can emulate three exposures from one by changing the output of the raw processing, one underexposed and one overexposed:

Before and after pair: top, a dark silhouette of a woman in a blue skirt seated on a rock against a dusky hilly landscape; bottom, the same scene brightened with a woman in a white dress seated on a rock in green grass.


Alo the colors have been made more saturated to emulate more what the eye seems rather than what the camera sees.

So when we merge these three pix with HDR software (I use GIMP with plug ins for that) as a result we get a little closer to Larkspurs world where all parts are now much closer to an ideal contrast:

A young woman in a white sleeveless dress sits on a rock in a grassy hillside at sunrise, looking to the left toward misty blue mountains and a valley below.


But you can't win them all, as the HDR software did not like the morning fog as seemingly over exposed and got rid of it.
 

Discussion

No I remember that one, very sad that I lost the orginal of that picture due to a computer crash. Yes, I know all about backups. Currently I have two external hard disks with backups
 
Here is another one, at the first beams of the sunrise.

The unedited raw:

Tinypic placeholder graphic with the Tinypic logo and the text 'THIS IMAGE OR VIDEO HAS BEEN MOVED OR DELETED'.


and after a HDR pass and also cloning away the telephone pole and wires

Tinypie logo above the message 'THIS IMAGE OR VIDEO HAS BEEN MOVED OR DELETED' in a blue-bordered placeholder box.


but maybe that's over the top.
 
Not sure about your Sony A900, but I think it allows several options for Auto Exposure Bracketing making 3, 4 or 5 consecutive shots with different selectable (bracketable) exposure speeds (same aperture and ISO). With the appropriate software these exposures can be merged later to an HDR composition. No need to make them in RAW, JPG is fine.

However if you use a single shot, as I did, to smear out the dynamic range, adding artificial over- and under exposure, then RAW is preferable, because it allows for more editting.

Edit; the picture was submitted to this challenge. Observing the pix in there carefully, you see details in both extreme light and dark situations. However you know when you overdid the HDR, when the clouds are getting near black.
 
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