I’m shooting myself on my foot.

Yes, as the post had suggested,  I am shooting myself on my foot. Why? If you’d remembered in my last posting, I had written this:

“It’s not that I hated HDR but the appearance of a HDR photo is too unnatural and the exposure latitude is severely limited / retarded by the software. My philosophy towards light is that, ‘If there is bright highlights, then there must be hard shadows in a photo’. Sorry guys, but seriously if you were to search my photo database, I don’t process my photos using HDR’s (disclaimer: who knows what’ll happen in the future?).”

Ok, now I am going to claim the disclaimer as I had just post processed my HDR (High Dynamic Range) photo and I had inserted this photo into my photo album. Ouch, I had just slapped myself multiple times on the face…

I got up 5 am as usual for all my sunrise shots while looking into the sky from my window, the rain had stopped and I was more than glad since it had been pouring the day before. I could see some stars in the night sky and in my heart, I was quite happy that it may be a good outing after all. While driving towards the point of interest, suddenly flashes of light appeared on the sky and I screamed ‘No! No! No!…not rain again!?” and upon reaching the place, I had a feeling that things may change for the worse. By 6.30am, I still could not see the sun and I knew it is going to be disappointing day for my trip and imagine, getting up that early and just to see that your efforts are wasted…So in my mind, what am I going to do with the scene in front of me? HDR popped up after a brief 5 minutes of thought. So there I go, went about doing my stuff and due to the nature of HDR post processing, there is a minimum requirement that you need at least 3 photos of the same scene but with different exposure of -2, 0, +2. All these photos add up to quite a lot of space and that morning alone, I shot 800Mb’s worth of photo in RAW format.

Upon reaching back, I started my work on the photo and was utterly surprised that my skills took a dive where after my initial evalutation, there was only a set of photos that were usable out of that 800Mb! GOSH!

In my mind, I just didn’t want any ‘normal’ HDR photos but something that is realistic enough and can be seen as a HDR. As a matter of fact, I just didn’t like the normal HDR post-processing because of the flatness in dynamic range and the photo would look retarded. So in the shot above, I had post processed 2 sets of HDR, one for the sky and the other for the foreground. After adjusting for the white balance and colour correction, I went ahead with layering both sets of HDR’s together. In order to enhance the shadows and highlights, I kept both layers separate while adjusting the curves for the sky and also the foreground. Next, I added a touch of colour burning process to further charactrize the shadows and also colour filter to give a hint of warmth to the shot. Finally, I sharpened the photos on each layer before combining them together. I used cloning tool to further touch up the areas that would seem ‘out of place’ because of the combination and finally, resizing the photos.