Prairie Thunderstorm

Taken at Winagami Lake in northern Alberta. Eighteen photos stitched

together and then given an HDR treatment. All comments & feedback gratefully received. Thanks

Splendid landscape. GJ

Wonderful sky Mark.  Well captured.  Regards always - michel

The contrast of darkness and light, moody grey clouds and rain against the subdued earth tones is remarkable. Very well done

It is a dramatic sky, but I'm confused by your HDR statement.  Some HDR treatments are used to produce an image as the eye saw it (and it's hard to detect that HDR was used), while other HDR treatments are used to produce exaggerated tones and colors, quite unlike what the eye saw.  I don't know which way you went, because I don't know what the scene actually looked like.  Was the HDR used to overcome the range of tones that were beyond the capabilities of the camera to capture in a single shot, or was the HDR used to create a dramatic yet artificial rendering of the scene?  Judging by the grayness of the clouds, I suspect the latter, but I'm not sure (only because I wasn't there).

Hi Stephen,

I applied an HDR treatment to (try to) make the scene more representative of how dramatic the clouds looked as the storm moved across.  In order to capture as much of the scene as I could I decided to use my camera in its manual exposure mode on an "average" metering setting and took eighteen shots.  The resulting pano was somewhat "flat" (see attached file), so I used HDR to try and recreate the sheer range of light in the moment.  

Cheating? Well, maybe... I guess it depends on your perspective (if you'll pardon the pun).

Thanks for taking time to comment.

Best Regards

Mark