Does she?….Or Doesn’t She?…….

A lot of you are old enough to remember that ad tag line. It was whether or not a woman used some product to color her hair. Well this is just a little something about HDR. It seems that anything new in photography always creates a whole bunch of drama. And HDR has like the rest of the country divided itself into to two camps……love it or hate it.

Being a registered independent, I have a foot in both camps. I have seen some over the top HDR that I really think works for an image and then there are images that you really can’t tell if the process has been applied. Maybe at a later date I’ll open up a discussion as to what is “photography” and what is “digital art”. I’ll need to be wearing asbestos underwear for that one….:0)

Back to todays image. What’s your guess…..is it? Or isn’t it? It is. And here is the why and the how.

This is a composite of two images. Both were taken with a split ND filter. I exposed one image for the clouds and sky and the second for the foreground and mountains, actually that is the Tungsten Hills in the foreground. Well, you are thinking that that is no real revelation. It isn’t except for the fact that I had to increase the ISO setting to 1600 on the foreground shot because the wind was blowing at a constant 20-25 mph with gusts to over 40 mph and I wanted a fast enough shutter speed to freeze anything in the foreground. I opened the images in Camera Raw, processed them and exported as Smart Objects into Photoshop. In PS I dragged the foreground document into and above the background document. Then I used the “Blend If” sliders in the Layers Style panel to blend the two layers. I won’t go into detail about the “Blend If” functions in Photoshop because all you have to do is search Youtube and you will find quite a few video tutorials on this process.

I didn’t have to bracket four or six shots. I didn’t have to use an expensive plugin. I just tweaked the rules a little bit, mainly because I can get away with the higher ISO with my Nikon D700, and used a simple process in Photoshop to get a nice image. There are so many ways with the tools that we have on hand to do what we want that I now think twice before plunking down my dollars for an expensive piece of software. Yes, it is easier to just buy something to do what you want, but you miss the experience of really learning the tools that you already have and the satisfaction of doing something yourself.

So I think my next series of articles is going to be about what I call the “Three P’s”. Prudence, Patience and Perseverance.

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