HDR Images of Lke Powell, Monument Valley, Mexican Hat

Thought you might like to view a few HDR Images of the Great Southwestern United States. I've been doing the majority of my posts at my Photography Lesson Center Blog . Here is a quick sampling of the Images I took while at Page Arizona and Lake Powell.

You can keep up to date with all of my future posts by subscribing to my RSS Feed at The Photography Lesson Center Blog.

Hope to see you there, Terry

HDR Images: Badlands of South Dakota, Sturgis Bike Week

We’ve been on the road for 3 days and we’ve decided to take a previously ridden route from Cody Wyoming over the pass to Sheridan and then on to Sturgis. It is a great scenic route and I was looking forward to getting some nice digital images and maybe a few High Dynamic Range photographs. Little did we know that the route we were about to take was closed due to a rock slide over the pass.

What the hell is going on? We have had 100 degree heat, lightning, rain, freezing rain and it’s about to get worse. About an hour out of Cody we started to hit road construction and the next thing we new we came apon a road sign saying the road was closed one mile ahead do to a rock slide. Not that I’m a complainer but it would have been nice if they would have put the sign up 3 miles back at the junction, but what the heck, we just back tracked and headed to our alternate route, Worland Wyoming.

From Worland we headed over the pass and hit 20 more miles of road construction and one hell of a rain storm. The trip is starting to get interesting and one we’ll not soon forget. After all that’s why we do this, it’s all about the adventure. To our surprise, we made it through the day with all our body parts and bikes intact. We finally landed in Buffalo Wyoming to spend the night without touching my camera or taking a single image.
The next morning we had good weather and a relaxing ride into Spearfish South Dakota where we checked into our motel and headed to our favorite watering hole, the Full Throttle Saloon in Sturgis. It is only Wednesday and things don’t start happening until around Friday or Saturday so things were a little quiet and relaxing. I took a quick shot of the bar to document the trip. This place will have over 10 thousand bikers raising hell here in a couple of days, but we’ll have to miss the party because we’ll probably be in Colorado or Utah buy then.

OOPS! Blogger seems to be messing with meand won't let me upload more images. To continue reading please go to: Photography Lesson Center

Sturgis Bike Rally Trip, Shooting High Dynamic Range Photographs

Sturgis Bike Rally Trip, Shooting High Dynamic Range Photographs

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.

HDR Digital Images of Sturgis Bike Trip 2009, First Day On The Road

Hey, I'm back from one heck of a ride. My riding buddy, Roger, and I were on the road for 15 days and it was quite an adventure this year. We experienced every kind of weather imaginal, including freezing rain, lightning storms, 50 to 60 mile an hour head and cross winds, a snow storm that closed Bear Tooth Pass,and a forest fire near Hat Creek in Northern California.

Our first day out was as we expected, fast and hard in 100 degree weather. We covered about 500 miles and didn't stop much to take photographs. I did however spot an interesting old home near Ontario Oregon and took the time to take a quick photo. Here is what I came up with. I titled this one, "Priorities". A guy has to do, what a guy has to do. Ride like a bandit and to hell with the house maintainance!

Here is the photograph taken with normal exposure settings:

I shot a series of three bracketed exposures of this image so I could do some experimenting with HDR. This image was taken in early afternoon and does have some challenging lighting, do to the extremes in contrast. Using "Photomatix" which is the software I use for creating High Dynamic Range photographs, I created the next image using the exposure blending mode. The 3 exposures were bracketed at: 2 stops over exposed to capture detail in the shadows: 2 stops underexposed to capture detail in the highlights: and a normal exposure for the mid range tones.

No additional color or density corrections have been done but the shadow and highlight details are much improved over the original single exposure and I now have a file with a wider range of detail in both the shadows and the highlights. Further tone and density corrections will be much easier to do with this image than if it were made from a single exposure.

Now for the fun part! Next I took the same 3 images that were used in Photomatix's exposure blending mode and used the image detail enhancer to create the following image. Like it or love it, I think you will admit, It is interesting, and does get your attention. The interesting part of using the image detail enhancer is, you have a larger amount of creative control. You can create images with beautiful detail in both the highlight and shadows, or you can opt to create a funky effect like the image below using a variety of slider options.

After all, photography is suppose to be fun! HDR is just another way of having a good time as well as a means to getting some nice digital photographs that might otherwise not take. HDR enables you to shoot in extreme or crappy lighting and still produce a high quality image. Oh, and by the way, you don't need to shoot HDR in raw because HDR software is going to convert your files to jpegs or tiffs anyway.

Stay tuned for more images, and a day by day account, of our 2009 Sturgis trip in the weeks to come.

Till next time, stay focused, Terry