Shots of Downtown Vancouver and the Rocky Mountains

RickD · Jul 8, 2014

Hey Everyone, Any feedback on these welcomed

An HDR shot at Sunset made in LR Enfuse using 3 separate shots. This was taken from my old balcony but unfortunately I don't live there anymore.

A shot of downtown Vancouver taken from QE Park, quite happy with how it turned out

Another HDR shot, this time of North Vancouver with the mountains. These shots were taken at Sunrise from my office window, unfortunately the windows are really dirty from the outside so the sky looks a bit grimy

A shot of downtown Vancouver with mount baker in the background, not sure if this is HDR or not, I think it might be

Any feedback is welcomed

bc_steve · Jul 8, 2014

Nice! Those mountains are in the Coast Range. The Rockies are quite a ways east.

RickD · Jul 9, 2014

my bad, I always thought they were the Rockies..... Can I blame it on being a BC / Canada n00b?

IzzieK · Jul 9, 2014

RickD said:
my bad, I always thought they were the Rockies..... Can I blame it on being a BC / Canada n00b?

Yes...you can make any excuses you like. You chose a very beautiful place to do your photoshoot and came out with winners. HDR too. but. not. overcooked.

Sarmad · Jul 9, 2014

Lovely captures. HDR is just hitting the sweet spot.

Big Mike · Jul 9, 2014

I love Vancouver, such a beautiful place.

All of your HDR shots are lacking in contrast, IMO.
To me, the whole point of using HDR, is because you are shooting a scene that has a greater dynamic range than the camera could comfortably capture in a single exposure. (in other words, any shot you took would be clipping on the left side, right side or both sides of the histogram).

So, in a roundabout way, HDR allows us to recover (or acquire) the parts of the image that would have been clipped (fully black or white). The end result that we usually want, is a histogram that is full, but not clipped on either side.

I checked the histogram of these images and they fall quite short of filling the graph left to right...which is indicative of lower contrast....and of course, they visually have a lower contrast that I personally would prefer.

To me, I think that if the shot required HDR in the first place (because the scene had a rather high contrast), it seems like you've gone too far if the resulting image ends up having too low of a contrast.

Of course, this is all subjective. Photography is art, after all.

robbins.photo · Jul 9, 2014

RickD said:
my bad, I always thought they were the Rockies..... Can I blame it on being a BC / Canada n00b?

Well as excuses go I'm pretty sure, "I'm from Canada" will cover you for most anything. Unless your in Canada and speaking to another Canadian. But yup, pretty much anywhere else and your gold.. lol

RickD · Jul 9, 2014

Haha, I'm not from Canada originally, just a n00b who moved to Vancouver 18 months ago so I'm gonna blame that!

Thanks for the feedback on the photos - @BigMike - I'm not sure if I'm using the wrong terminology here (still a photo n00b)... Maybe instead of HDR I should be saying that I'm using exposure bracketing and then blending the shots together in post... is that same thing or something different, I'm confused now

Designer · Jul 9, 2014

First shot is the best. You've included some intermediate foreground and the low cloud echoes the marina. Needs a little straightening.

Big Mike · Jul 9, 2014

RickD said:
Thanks for the feedback on the photos - @BigMike - I'm not sure if I'm using the wrong terminology here (still a photo n00b)... Maybe instead of HDR I should be saying that I'm using exposure bracketing and then blending the shots together in post... is that same thing or something different, I'm confused now

Yes, that's the jist of a typical HDR workflow. It just looks to me, that somewhere along the line, you are doing something that is overly compressing the dynamic range of the scene, so that the resulting image has low contrast.

Just looking at the histogram, it's easy to see when an image doesn't have any true white or black tones....which often gives a 'muddy' looking result, especially when the original scene had a wide dynamic range.

RickD · Jul 9, 2014

hmmm... Any idea what it could be, I use LR Enfuse to blend the images together, and dont manipulate them before blending. I usually edit them in post after blending.... Maybe i'm going wrong with the workflow somewhere... or maybe my original photos just aren't up to par

bc_steve · Jul 10, 2014

RickD said:
my bad, I always thought they were the Rockies..... Can I blame it on being a BC / Canada n00b?

No big deal, now yoh know

bc_steve · Jul 10, 2014

I am terrible with a touchscreen!

Big Mike · Jul 10, 2014

RickD said:
hmmm... Any idea what it could be, I use LR Enfuse to blend the images together, and dont manipulate them before blending. I usually edit them in post after blending.... Maybe i'm going wrong with the workflow somewhere... or maybe my original photos just aren't up to par

After blending, I would have a look at the histogram. In Lightroom, you can adjust the 5 main sliders or just grab the histogram directly (by any of the 5 sections) and move it around. I would try to spread out the histogram so that it at least approached both the left and right sides.
Of course, there might be some different things you could do in Enfuse....I don't know, I've never used it.

What I've been doing lately, for an HDR type workflow, is to take the images in LR and using the 'Merge to HDR in Photoshop CC' (obviously have to have Photoshop installed). I let Photoshop do the merge (64 bit), but then save it right back into Lightroom. The file that comes back into LR now has exposure sliders that go from -10 to +10 (rather than the usual -5 to +5). Then I just adjust the image as I normally would in LR...I just have a wider dynamic range to play with.