Last week my friend Terry Reinert and I went out on a drive hoping to catch some good photos of an impending storm. Unfortunately, the storm never materialized, but there were some nice cumulus clouds to be seen and photos to be had. It had been over a year since I had attempted an HDR photo, but that day seemed to lend itself to one. The major benefit of HDR photography is that everything is exposed perfectly.

One of the large hurdles for landscape photography is getting land and sky to both expose well in a single capture. In the past, I’ve used a combination of 1 and 3 stop split neutral density filters to darken down the sky (as it is typically the brightest part of the frame) to a point where it has about the same light levels as the land (or in the case of winter scenes, to darken down the snow if it is direct sunlight). The downside to this is that it can be cumbersome and time consuming. One alternative method is HDR photography where several images are taken, some under exposed and some over exposed. By finessing these images together, one can get the full dynamic range of the image, so that everything is properly exposed. The end result looks something like this:

The Road to Nowhere

The setup for this was very simple, a Nikon D80 on a tripod set low to the ground and 3 exposures at +/- 2 stops. HDR merge was done in Photoshop, tone mapping in Photomatix, and touch ups in Photoshop.

Later that day, I did a very quick photo shoot with a couple of a friend’s chameleons. This photo was lit by sunlight (no flashes were used) and taken over the front lawn. Looking back on it, I really wish I had an off camera flash. Time to start a christmas list…

Chameleon