My First HDR Image

For the last couple of days we were out in Western New York on the grounds of the Chautauqua Institution doing interviews and gathering footage for a capital campaign video for a client of ours. (By the way, the interviews we did yielded some great quotes for the video, but I also feel they were some of my best work. I'll grab a few screen shots and post them next week.)

Anyway, back to the image above. This is the sanctuary of the church we were shooting in and while we were packing up I thought I would take the opportunity to try out the whole HDR thing. For this image, I took 5 bracketed exposures with my D200 on a tripod and processed using CS2's Merge to HDR function.

Once the image was made, I converted to 16bit and changed the drop-down menu option to "Local Adaptation" and made some adjustments to the curve - most importantly, moving the black point to the left edge of the histogram. Basically, I followed the same process as outlined in the posts I linked to on Tuesday.

This was just my first outing with HDR and, I must say, I really like the crisp-ness of the image and more true-to-life result. I can't wait to do some more experimenting. (Also, just a note about the image, unfortunately, the shadows on the cross make it look like there's a motion blur, which is unfortunate, and a little distracting.)