Nature Light Photo

Death Valley Redux – Pt. 2 – HDR

On this trip I spent one evening out on the Badwater salt flats. It’s a fascinating place. The valley floor is actually a slurry/slush of highly concentrated salt water. Its solid and easy to walk on, but it creates a thick, almost cement like, crust on everything it touches. It coats your boots, your equipment, and your clothes. If it touches the ground, it has salt on it.

I met a fellow photographer on the salt flats, Don Geyer of Mountain Scenes Photography. He was using graduated filters to capture the dynamic range that the situation presented. I asked him why he didn’t use HDR and he replied that he couldn’t get the image to look natural. He doesn’t like the weird, other world looking images that most people bring to mind when they think of HDR.

I use Photomatix Pro to process my HDR images out of Lightroom. I actually use the default settings as a starting point and then I might tweak the Strength, Color Saturation, Luminosity, Microcontrast, Smoothing in the main menu and the White Point, Black Point, and Gamma in the Tone Setting menu. If you click the help button on the bottom of the menu you will get a description of what each slider does.

You can always get that Grunge look by clicking on the preset button at the bottom of the menu.

For those of you who don’t quite understand HDR, here are seven images. The first five are the original images each taken one stop apart. The next one is the normal looking HDR; where those five are combined to bring the light range within what the human eye can see. The last one is the grunge type of HDR that a lot of people bring to mind when HDR images are mentioned, but is NOT what the look I am looking for in my HDR images.

Please leave a comment or questions you may have.

Tags: HDR, Photography