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.)