landscapes iii Road to the Rocks

Breathtaking view! Amazing colors, shapes, light and texture. A fantastic and very interesting sky! Brilliantly conceived and exceptional execution! I see you've used some serious glass, in front of your glass... and yet opted for HDR... would you mind sharing your technique? I'd love to know.

Thanks for the kind comments.

I always shoot with a polarizer to get the best skies and hues at dusk/dawn. In this case, I had great early light on the rocks, but when I metered the sky, rocks and the foreground there was large contrast difference all across the scene. So, I had to use a ND grad filter. Since, there wasn't a clearly defined and distinct boundary between light and dark areas I choose to use a soft-stop ND grad. All I had was a 2f-stop soft-step filter and even then, it wasn't enough to satisfactorily capture this high contrast scene. So, I bracketed my shots and later combined 3 images to get a naturally looking HDR image, taking care not to overdo the HDR effect.

Regards,

Raghuveer

Thanks Raghuveer for the details. Actually now I can better see the dark to light exposure on the rock on the left, due to the ND. Did you bracket 1 stop or 2 stops apart, on this and other shots in your portfolio? Also, do you obtain the final image directly using HDR software, as opposed to painting layer masks in photoshop? If so, which software do you use? Sorry for too many questions, hope you won't mind. I've really been getting horrible HDR results with most software, but then, using grad ND for HDR never occurred to me. All of your images are awesome, to say the least...

Hi Indraneel,

Here, I made 3 exposures spaced -1 1/3, 0 and +1 1/3. Typically, I combine 3exposures ranging from anything between -2 to 2 or -1 to 1 in Photomatix and then use layer masks in PS on the generated tif image. All HDR s/w take some getting used to, as there are quite a few knobs. With some practice you can get great results. No worries on the questions. I learnt quite a bit from the forums on P-N and am only glad to help.

Regards,

Raghuveer

Thank you Raghuveer, every bit helps.