Winter Glory

I shot this yesterday morning during the first break in an area-wide fog layer that has plagued Central Washington for more than a week. I needed six Raw exposure layers to get the high dynamic range of this scene properly balanced. Difficult to see at this magnification, the central pool is actually two separate, adjacent thirty-foot pools, slowly rotating in opposite directions with ice rings floating in them. The layer for the pools was a time exposure to capture a sense of the rotation of the strange rings.

Thanks for looking.

An outstanding HDR image! Excellent composition and fantastic colors.

Merry Christmas Marc! This is another fine blend!!

Bobby:

   Thanks for the kind words, but this is not HDR. I don't do HDR.

Hi Marc,

      I thought you mentioned that:

"I needed six Raw exposure layers to get the high dynamic range of this scene properly balanced."

Maybe my understanding of HDR is incorrect but what I wanted to say is that this is a very beautiful and natural looking image.

I did Bobby, but I put them in a stack in Photoshop, each with a mask, and painted away with various % of black (or you could think white) to hide unwanted areas and achieve the effect I desired. This is an extremely versatile technique that allows infinite on-the-fly correction, including after the file is recalled from a save. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but once the HDR process creates the file, it is a single-layer compressed file from which you cannot go back and tweak the blending.

Marc, by definition it is HDR, just not processed by an HDR software. If you need more than one exposure to capture the entire exposure range, then it would be considered HDR because the scene's range of light exceeded the sensor's capability to record that range of exposure in a single frame. I agree with you in that it is not HDR as most know it, but the fact that you processed this by hand makes it even better than HDR. Some refer to the manual process of blending images as EDR, or extended dynamic range. When camera's are able to handle 11 stops of exposure in a single capture, then HDR will begin to become an obsolete acronym!