Tech Info: Nikon D300s | Tokina 12-24 @12mm| ISO 200 | f/11 | 5 exp from 1/2s to 8s
A HDR taken during the recent family vacation to Lake Tahoe.
Lake Tahoe is just about 200 miles from my place, but we took nearly 8+ hrs to reach. The reason for such a long time is that my back needs frequent breaks during the drive, so that I don’t injure it (especially since I’ve started playing cricket again). Also the fact that we stopped at every turnout that you can find on the way adds to the overall drive time. The whole vacation was for just one person, my elder daughter Nidhi. She has been seeing quite a lot of cartoons which had been showing snow. So we decided to give her a break for her imaginative snow and head to a place where there was still a possibility of finding real snow. The joy of her first snow was indeed worth the strain 🙂
As we entered the hotel lobby of Harvey’s, my eye was searching for all kinds of compositions for some HDR shots. The interiors are so well-lit with all kinds of color combinations. After the usual check-in and dinner was done, I came down to the lobby to get their permission to take some pictures. The staff was really courteous and after they found out that I wasn’t doing any commercial shoot, they were ok with it.
This is the first of the many compositions I tried. Sometimes it’s so easy to evaluate pictures taken by others objectively, but when it comes to my own, I struggle with it. Can’t seem to figure out why, but one of the reasons might be that everytime I see it, I’m mentally back at the place. Probably someday I’ll figure out how to park those thoughts aside and look at it objectively.
Processing:
- Used Lightroom 2.5 to convert the raw image with some basic adjustments to white balance. These shots are a mess for white balance due to different colored light sources
- Export to Photomatix 4 and generated a tonemapped version. Re-import it back to Lightroom for catalog management.
- Used Photoshop CS4 to add a layer of curves adjustment for some selective contrast using masks.
- Also used some of the other bracketed shots for cleaning up some blowout areas.
- A noise reduction layer using Topaz DeNoise.
- Cloned out a small distraction at the top right of the frame.
- Resized the image for web and added smart-sharpen layer.
- Used Bridge to add keywords and metadata.
Hover your mouse over the image to see the Before version.
Some of my non-photog friends used to ask me some questions on HDR. So I wrote a post long ago on it and you can check it out if you are new to HDR.
10 Questions on HDR
