Dorr Point, Acadia National Park.

Last week, I led a photo tour in Maine's Acadia National Park.  Our group of ten hit all the park hot spots, ate some great food, and were the beneficiaries of some great light (up at 4:00 a.m. three out of five days).  The hot technique that much of the class was experimenting with was making High Dynamic Range images by combining several exposures of the same image.  I demonstrated Photoshop's Merge to HDR feature, but we were all soon opting for using the much more intuitive Photomatix Pro.  I had tried it a few times, but after a week of regular use, I am definitely impressed with what it can do.


Dawn on Cadillac Mountain - HDR version.

The above image is the result of four different exposures being merged by Photomatix.  The image below is the best I could do using a split-neutral density filter, one exposure and some tweaking in Lighroom.


Dawn on Cadillac Mountain - one exposure version.

Pretty cool, huh?  Here are a couple more examples from the Acadia trip:


Dawn on Cadillac Mountain.


Jordan Pond after sunset.

On Sunday, I went out to shoot a property in Medfield, MA that is part of a conservation effort by the Trust for Public Land. It's a beautiful, but unassuming property, and I was glad to try out a couple of HDR shots there, particularly in the oak-pine woods.  Here are a couple of the HDR images from that shoot:


Afternoon on an esker, Medfield, MA.


Tire swing.

The forest shot in particular is very hard to capture in one exposure, but the HDR version looks pretty good.

You can download a free trial version of Photomatix at: www.hdrsoft.com/.

And I have no affiliation whatsoever with the Photomatix folks.  I even paid full-price for the software.

Until next time...
-Jerry

 

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