Day 7 - Tone Mapped HDR Landscape

As I was driving home tonight there was a bit of pink in the sky and I thought I might be able to get a nice sunset image.  I stopped a little way from home and walked along a path that was fairly high up over New Mill, where I live.  I had been on a different part of this path quite a while ago and taken some sunset photos when there was a lot of colour in the sky.  The path is really an old road that usually has quite a lot of big pools of water along it and I had used these to get reflections of the sky last time I came here.

However tonight the sky was more layers of cloud and I soon realised that it was not going to be as pink as it could have been.  I took a few shots along the path, across the valley and over to the distant horizons but none of them were inspiring me much.  As I walked back towards my car I kept looking for something interesting, some weeds along the side of the path or the broken down stretches of dry stone wall.  Finally I stopped at this point where there was a wooded valley with some yellow flowering gorse bushes on the hillside beyond and I felt there was a shot here.  Behind the hillside there were other hills stretching back into the far horizon and then the slightly pink coloured grey and streaky clouds.

It was getting a bit dark by now so I figured that the best way to make an image of this scene was to make a tone mapped HDR.  This involves taken three shots, one at normal exposure, one two stops darker and one two stops lighter.  This is called bracketting and my camera will automatically do this by using different shutter speeds.  When the three shots are on the computer they are merged together using a program called Photomatix which has a vast array of controls to determine how the images are merged and presented.  The program uses the dynamic range of all the input images to produce one output image so can use the extra two stops at the top and the extra two stops at the bottom to put extra detail into the final images.  At one end of the scale the resultant images are close to reality whereas at the other end of the scale the final image takes on more of a painterly appearance, almost cartoon like.

As there was no particular subject in this image I decided to go for a more ethereal look.  The one thing that I don't like about this image is the halo effect in areas of high contrast, most noticeable along the tops of the trees.  I guess it's quite hard for the program to reconcile the high contrast so there's no option but to live with it.  Maybe it would be possible to counteract the effect in Photoshop but I haven't given that a try as yet.