First HDR, not what I wanted!

[MissCream]

I know the water is directly in the middle of the frame so any ideas on cropping go ahead! This was made of of 5 images but it wasn't what I was going for, I'm not sure if it was because I was too far away or what but it just seems really dark with very little detail. Should I have taken more then just 5 pictures? I never do any sort of HDR but this sunset was spectacular and I thought it would be fun to try

Thanks

 

[tirediron]

Hmmm... interesting. To be honest, I suspect that the end result would have been much stronger with a couple of stops of G-ND vice the HDR, BUT it's a neat image. The only thing that really bothers me is the foreground. I would try and re-work some deteail into the ground and maybe increase the colour saturation in the water a bit.

 

[MissCream]

Hmmm... interesting. To be honest, I suspect that the end result would have been much stronger with a couple of stops of G-ND vice the HDR, BUT it's a neat image. The only thing that really bothers me is the foreground. I would try and re-work some deteail into the ground and maybe increase the colour saturation in the water a bit.

Thanks, good idea I had filters too but for some reason I decided not to use them... It must have been the one million (quick estimate) mosquitoes or the case of beer. Who knows!

 

[480sparky67 67]

What EVs did you use to build this with? You've got both pure black (0:0:0) and white (255:255:255) in your results.

 

[butterflygirl921]

i would honestly leave the photo its gorgeous

 

[MissCream]

What EVs did you use to build this with? You've got both pure black (0:0:0) and white (255:255:255) in your results.

Oh dear.. I didn't research HDR at all, haha and I wonder why it didn't turn out how I wanted... Anywho I just started from the correct exposure and then adjusted the SS from there.

 

[480sparky67 67]

So did you just go one direction from EV0 with the shutter speed or both?

 

[levinest]

Doing HDR with water/waves, especially at such a time as sunset, just seems like it's going to be trouble because the water is changing so much between images. I haven't had much experience at all with HDR yet but my understanding is that you really need the content of the images to be merged to be as close to identical as possible other than the exposure settings. A consistently-flowing river/stream could work ok but a shoreline where the waves are physically moving around seems very likely to be the cause of your problems.