Gone – A Pseudo HDR

Gone

Oh I do miss summer or even just spring. I still have snow in my garden and there is ice on lakes and in the fiord. This is absurdly late, compared to normal winters. You know, it has been snowing for a couple of hours today. So this photo is an archive photo from last summer. I had just got my first full frame DSLR and took it out for a walk down by the fiord, in my hometown Roskilde. I came by this jetty with a pair of shoes on it, but nobody was around… Strange.

About the processing

This is a single exposure RAW file, that I did a minus 2 and plus 2 virtual copies of in Lightroom of. I then exported the three photos to Photomatix. A problem with HDR is that it often gives a grayish color to the sky, which is quite odd, because much of the rest of the image often turns out quite colorful. So I had to go back to the single exposure and process the sky individually, and then merge that into the rest of the image. I had some quite bad noise problems with the shoes, because they were in shadow. But using by some heavy noise reduction both before exporting to Photomatix and later again in Photoshop they ended up quite good.

Misty fish net

Misty fish net
This I saw after driving my son to school. I threw the car to the side of the road and got to catch this misty morning.
I have had this photo lying around for some time. I took it as a 3 shot HDR (2 ev steps), but I didn’t really work as an HDR. The light just wasn’t for HDR. Later I tried cropping away some ground and a tree to the left, leaving only the fish net. Now it started to be something. I then toned it slightly to the yellow/brown from cold grey. I did that by increasing the temperature from 5800 to 9433 in Lightroom and then the tint I added +14 to. Then I got this tranquil mood.