Well day 2 of our our annual Sturgis Bike Trip was as expected. We blew through Idaho and made it to our second nights destination , Alpine Wyoming. Idaho was hotter than heck. The only time we stopped was for fuel and water. We were on the freeway all day and even at 75 to 85 mph the wind didn't cool us of much with the 100 plus degree temperatures. No photographs were taken, but we did cover about 500 miles.
Alpine Wyoming is about 40 miles south of Jackson Wyoming. Alpine is a great place to eat, drink, and a great place to start day three of our trip. We stopped on our way out of Jackson and I took a couple of quick shots, of the Grand Tetons, just to document the trip. Here is an example of the difference between a normally exposed file and an HDR (high dynamic range) photograph taken just prior to leaving the Tetons National Park.
Normal Exposure: Taken with average meter reading using aperture priority mode at f/16 and ISO @ 100. Shutter speed at 1/60 of a second.
High Dynamic Range Photograph: The initial exposure was taken with the same exposure settings as the image above. Then an additional exposure was taken at plus 1 1/2 stops for increased detail in the shadow area. The third exposure was taken at a minus 1 1/2 stops to capture more details in the highlights. The three exposures were then blended together using Photoatix software. Here is the resulting image. 
The weather began to take a turn for the worse as we crossed the mountains and headed towards Dubois Wyoming and the Wind River area. We did stop long enough to capture the following image before we hit the worst of the bad weather. After I took these exposures we hit some pretty severe weather. You can see the clouds coming in from a massive cold front which came out of Canada. The rest of the day we rode through wind, lightning, and a lot of rain, on our way to our next scheduled stop, Cody Wyoming. We had planned to ride Bear Tooth Pass but it was closed due to snow that day! Bummer!
Normal Exposure: Taken with a Canon EOS 5D. Settings were at aperture priority at f/11 and a 60th of a second shutter speed. ISO was set @ 100
This High Dynamic Range Image was created with the same process as the proceeding HDR using Photomatix's HDR software and the detail image enhancement setting.
As you can see there is a strong weather front coming in from the north and we did get our butts soaked later in the day.
Stay tuned for our next installments of our, 15 day road trip to Sturgis, and other cool places to travel in the Great Western US.
By the way if you want to learn more about how to shoot digital photographs, or if you would like to give a nice gift to an aspiring photographer, check out my course on "Mastering Digital Photography Made Easy". You can pick up a free sample here.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment