Fantasy Surf

[robertandrewphoto]

Fantasy Surf is a standalone building that includes a Flowrider sheet wave machine. This past weekend was the National event for the US Flow Tour. I was there shooting the event and thought that the building would look much better if shot in HDR.

More information can be found here: FlowRider, Wave Pool, Surf Pool, Surf Machines & Wave Machines | Wave Loch

This was shot using a 10.5mm Nikkor Fisheye. This was composed of 8 Exposures, with the middle exposure being f/9 @ 1/60. ISO = 160.
The middle exposure was intentionally underexposed.

EV Ranges were (+2 - [f/9 @ 1/25]) - (-7 - [f/9 @1/1600])

After processing in Photomatix, this was cropped and sharpened in photoshop.

All comments and critiques are appreciated.

 

[FanBoy]

Don't you think using five exposures would have been enough? Eight is alot, and probably caused so much ghosting. Thanks for posting exposure information.

 

[robertandrewphoto]

I honestly think I could have done more on the low end, and maybe just done a little photoshop work afterwards to manually get rid of the ghosting.

 

[vipgraphx]

As mentioned the ghosting is a big problem, you also have blown out areas in your clouds and haloing going on. The image seems rather flat with lack of POP. I see no black areas which you really should have.

Over all I give this a 5 from 1-10 on processing.

 

[KongKurs]

The image seems rather flat with lack of POP. I see no black areas which you really should have.

+1

Photomatix is often not enough to produce the final image. It just does the HDR part.
Always check in to Photoshop afterwards for some contrast or levels adjustment and color adjustment. And in this case, the frame with the best looking sky could have been layered in with a layer mask, to get rid of the ghosting in the clouds.