I’m returning to the huge collection of unedited images I still have from April’s fabulous “NxNW” trip to Moab today. This shot was taken on the last night of the visit inside the Colorado National Monument near Grand Junction. Justin Balog, Bob Lussier, Mike Criswell and I spent a lazy couple of hours around sunset hanging around stalking the light. The remaining three adventurers, Rick Louie, Mark Garbowski and Chris Nitz had already left to head towards Denver airport.
I didn’t shoot a lot of HDR during this trip but Colorado National Monument definitely needed bracketing – bright skies and relatively dark foregrounds left me thinking I would do some exposure fusion but, when I got the images into Photomatix and took a look at the tonemapped result, I decided to stick with that path. The textures really came alive and I loved the sky in this result.
I’ve been backing away from a lot of heavily processed HDRs recently but, seeing this, I’ll probably start ratcheting the sliders up a bit on some of the other shots from this trip to see what I can make of them too.
Another thing I tend to shy away from is heavy reliance on third-party plug-ins but I broke my tradition here too, finishing this image off in Nik Viveza, Imagenomic Noiseware Pro and Lightroom 4.
This is terrific. I concur with your sentiment about getting away from HDR, but now and again I dabble in it and often pleased with the result. Nicely done; not over the top and just right.
Kris Koeller´s last post ..High Above Victoria Harbor
I wouldn’t say I’m backing away from HDR, just backing away from a processing style that most people associate with HDR (like this shot, for example). I’m still using a lot of HDR but am tending to use Lightroom’s 32 bit support or Photomatix exposure fusion rather than tonemapping these days.
Dave, this is jaw-dropping! Really well done and I totally agree with the tone mapped image here, especially with that sky! Awesome!
An amazing capture! Tone-mapping really suits this image, and you’ve done it just right.
Perry Bailey´s last post ..P-51 Mustang
Lovely, I remember holding the flash for the experiments! good fun!
Michael Criswell´s last post ..Denver Museum of Nature and Science
Thanks, Mike. Actually, this is one of the ones I shot before playing with the flash. I’ve not processed any of those yet but I’m sure you’ll see one at some point in the not too distant future.