fhmillard

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Thank you Paula and Henri,

 

Henri, this storm, a mountain cyclone more typical in summer, lasted for about 8 hrs. with sustained winds over 110kph. dumping an additional 1.5 meters of blown snow on my house. I would liked to have composed a "better" shot, but it was difficult enough to hold the camera still.

Carsten,

Thank you for your generous assessments of my panoramas.

Thank you Carsten, I will heed Micheal's observation and do some brush work on the scene transitions.

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Thank you Micheal,

You have exposed the reason why this was originally posted in BW.

Thank you Philip for your generous assessment of my panoramas, there are some great landscapers on photo.net that I study.

 

Yes, 15 shots, five each, of left to right 3rds, blended with photomatix -- tone mapped. Photomatix can give very dramatic, if not extreme, HDR with very good colors, tweaking its controls is necessary to get "natural looking" results. PS HDR merge also needs some tweaking to get good tonal balance and contrast, and colors are not dramatic. I use these two methods for 3 or more shots to blend.

 

I manually blend 2 shots, very good tutorials, for manual blending, can be found at www.thelightsright.com.

 

I use aperture priority with auto bracketing from -2ev to +2ev, so only the shutter speed changes, and for most situations the exposure range seems to suit me.

 

AND I shoot exclusively in RAW mode, which means each image is large (15mb), so 5 shots is 75mb -- I 60 shots on 1gb card, so HDR w/bracketing requires BIG camera memory media. I hope this helps.

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Great color separation. The "orange light" of dawn on the mountains, while the foreground remains "cool" creates this great photo. Merry Xmas, and thank you for helping me. Frank

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Very good capture, excellent depth of field.

HDR -- not all of my HDR is done in photomatix. I also manually blend and use PS hdr merge tool.

Excellent color, detail and tones. Superb transition of sky and birds.

 

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Thank you Steven!!

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Thank you Jitka.

 

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you Henri. Thanks for all your time and comments on my photos. I like this the best too. I decided to put focus on tree and sun, leaving field as subtle accent -- the blue to orange gradient really helped here. And I figured out how to get photomatix blending to look "natural".

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Carsten,

This is an experiment. I was playing around with TLR split channel BW conversion, changing curves and shadow/highlight in PS on each of the RGB layers. Shadow/highlight effect on blue layer brought out the field, but lost detail in the tree; curve work on red layer flattened overall contrast. The color one is much better, and a newer version is at PC. One thing I believe I have "mastered" is HDR w/Photomatix to get more natural looking results. Photos where Photomatix effects are exaggerated do not appeal to me, and my ICE FOG effect was deliberate.

Wonderful shot, and great scenery! IMHO, the sky needs to be darker and there is a spot of too much highlight in the water reflection towards the middle. I like the contrast and saturation.

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Thank you for viewing Michelle. I tried some impressionism here. The scene was at sunset with nearly clear sky. I have the color version in my recent uploads.

I would crop off the tree on the right, since doing so does not, IMHO, spoil the composition -- unless of course you just want it in. For photos like this it might be better to shoot at least 3 shots, -2,0 and +2ev, and blend them with a tool like Photomatix; or take 2 shots, -2 and +2 ev. and blend them manually (www.thelightsright.com) has a tutorial for that. If you can't take this shot until next summer, because RNP is now closed, you might try some means to darken the highlights. If you use PS create a new layer from background image and use shadow/highlight adjustments on the new layer and blend to taste.

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Henri, I will provide color version later today.