Ghost Town Hdr! Options

[Marc Koegel]

Hello everyone,

I thought the post I just did applies to multiple forums, so here is a little teaser of it.

The following image was made in a Ghost Town located near Saskatoon, SK.



This image was taken while photographing my series of black and white long exposure landscapes.

You can see those images by visiting 'Marc's Corner' forum and reading the Canadian Prairies Roadtrip posting.

Direct link is here!

This images was made up of 9 exposures, bracketed by 1 stop each. My Nikon D3 has a very handy automatic bracketing feature, which, combined with high speed motor drive, can record all 9 images in just 1 second. Images were shot hand held, no need for a tripod. To be hand-holdable, I had to set the ISO to 3200. This camera provides amazing quality even at such high settings....unless you are shooting with a late model DSLR I would recommend to use a tripod and use an ISO under 1000. This would have given me better results as well...

Images were merged in PhotoMatix Pro HDR software. I cranked up the strength and color saturation sliders to get this very strong visual result. A final tweak in Photoshop CS4 was needed, but took only a few minutes as all I was after was some simple local brightness and contrast adjustments.

If you haven't tried HDR and Photomatix yet, type it into Flickr one day. You'll get an amazing array of sample images. There are some very competent Photographers out there using this software.

Have fun trying!

Marc