African sunrises are spectacular and sometimes seem to carry on forever.
Photographing these amazing colors sometimes turns out to be quite a disappointing exercise as the images do not always show your viewer what you saw. Had an experience like this a few morning ago. Sat watching the sun rise behind a dead leadwood and shot off a few frames. Actually it was the same tree in which the bird in the previous post was sitting.
Had a bit of fun playing with the images afterwards. ‘Playing’ because I did this all in less than 4 minutes purely to show the differences between the original image, a Lightroom-ed image and an HDR image. Here goes:
The above image is the RAW file without any work done on it. This is what you would have gotten if you were shooting JPEG as well. Ok-ish colors but zero details in the shadow. If your goal was to shoot a straight out silhouette, good attempt.
The above image is exactly the same RAW file that has been adjusted slightly in Lightroom. Nothing fancy here. Simply tweaked the following sliders:
- Fill Light
- Clarity
- Vibrance
- Saturation
- Brightness
- Post Crop Vignette Amount
- Feather
Done. Literally took no more than 30 seconds, and no fancy stuff in Photoshop, but it makes quite a big difference to the final image. Is it better? Well that will depend on who you ask. This you can only answer for yourself. What were you trying to do with the image? What did you want to show?
Just out of interest I created a three exposure, handheld HDR image of the same tree.
Definitely a lot more punch and dynamic range. Is it better? Again, who are you asking? What was the goal? Pure documentary style photography or photography as an art?
I know there are a lot of people out there who think that HDR photography is straight from the devil but I still quite enjoy the possibilities. (Hi, my name is Gerry and I shoot HDR.) If you take time to plan your images and take time to properly process them to achieve a slightly more natural look than the results can be brilliant!
Not always, but definitely sometimes.
What do you think? Which do you prefer and why?
Until next time.
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