Winter Morning Sunrise in Ireland

[achtungbarry]

Taken near Carton House, Maynooth, Ireland

HDR from 3 exposures

I'd love to hear your feedback on this one. Here are the details of how I took and processed the shot:


-2 0 +2

f22

ISO 100

I took this photo on the grounds of Carton House in Maynooth during an outing with my photography club. Normally when I go to Carton, I photograph the beautiful boat house on the other side of the river in the left of the shot. On this particular morning however, it was the cool winter light casting beautiful shadows on the ground and creating wonderful textures on the surfaces it reflected off that grabbed my attention.

This scene was a perfect candidate for HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography as it allowed me to preserve all the details of the sky during sunrise as well as the shadows and textures in the foreground. A single photograph would have left much of the foreground as a silhouette.
Firstly I put my camera on the tripod in order to ensure a perfectly sharp shot. I set up so that the sun was behind the tree to prevent too many blown out highlights and to the right of the path so that the path would lead into the shot from the bottom left corner in a diagonal across the scene.

I used an aperture of f22 to ensure that the scene would be sharp from foreground to background. I set the ISO to 100 to keep noise to a minimum (which is even more of an issue when shooting for HDR). I then set the auto exposure bracketing to -2 0 +2.
Now I like to have a human element in my shots but unfortunately on this morning there were few people around and the others were off photographing the beautiful river house. To overcome this I set the 10 second timer and then ran down the path in order to be provide the human interest myself........much to the amusement of my photography club friends.
Luckily the Canon 40D takes the 3 bracketed exposures automatically when the timer is on so all I had to do was set up, click the shutter and get into position. It was important to stay perfectly still for the 3 exposures in order to prevent ghosting during post procesing.

I converted the 3 RAW files to TIFFs in Lightroom and then used Photomatix to merge the 3 shots to HDR. I then finished off the processing in Photoshop. HDRs by their very nature lack contrast so I like to add some contrast back in during processing. The great thing about HDR is that because all of the tonal detail from shadows to highlights is present in the scene, you have total control over the contrast.

Thanks to HDR I was able to preserve all the detail in the sky during sunrise as well as the foreground detail.

 

[Bynx]

An absolutely spectacular shot. Its brings a tear to my eye. Thats as close to a perfect picture as Ive ever seen. Pixel perfect. And a nice explanation too.

 

[myshkin]

Great shot. I really love it. What was your shutter speed on this? Was your 0 exp under exposured?

 

[achtungbarry]

Great shot. I really love it. What was your shutter speed on this? Was your 0 exp under exposured?

Thanks for the kind comments so far. I don't have access to what shutter speeds I used right now but I'll find out and let you know and yes the middle exposure was slightly underexposed to prevent blown highlights.

 

[Provo]

This is one of those HDR that has a deep impact and makes you think
simply by looking at it this came out superb thanks for sharing such an awesome inspiring image well done.:thumbup: