I won’t have too many opportunities for photography today but, since June 26th has been declared International HDR Day by Rick Sammon and Trey Ratcliff, I figured I should find an excuse to shoot and post at least 1 photo. The kids and I spent some time this morning at Barsana Dham, the local Hindu temple and also home to the only ”pick-it-yourself” peach orchard in the area (or, at least, the only one I am aware of this side of Fredericksburg). After picking enough fruit to keep us in cobbler until at least February, we took a wander around the temple grounds and I shot a few handheld brackets.
This image is derived from 5 exposures, handheld, merged using Photomatix and touched up in Lightroom. After last week’s class, I’ve actually changed my tune on using Photomatix to merge handheld shots (I did an example to show how badly Photomatix handled realignment and discovered that the result was fine. Remind me not to change the options I use after my initial plan next time I run the class!). I always used to use Photoshop (a long process) since it’s alignment is so much better but I’ve discovered that, with some images at least, Photomatix actually does a reasonable job of realigning so I’ll now try it first and only fall back on Photoshop if it fails horribly.