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.

Tweet This Post Facebook

Death Valley Redux – Pt. 1

I made another trip to Death Valley National Park last weekend. I tried to concentrate more on shooting different subjects, places, and with different techniques. I put in over 170 miles on back country (offroad/dirt) roads, but that’s another story. I will be focusing on the photography aspects of the trip over the next few posts rather than the trip itself.

It had rained a torrential amount right before my last trip to Death Valley causing roads to be closed and some of the places of interest were unaccessible. Badwater was flooded and the Racetrack Playa was underwater. This time, both were in great shape and I got the opportunity to take the shots I wanted.

The Racetrack Playa was in great shape, but it was WINDY!! A couple of times, I had to kneel down in order to not be blown over and walking was an experience in careful foot placement just to keep my balance. The photography lesson was that I had to have some great tripod technique to get the images I envisioned. This includes spreading the legs of the tripod out rather than shortening them in order to get the low angel shots I was trying to capture.

Later in the trip I traveled to Badwater, the lowest place on the continent. Again, I was trying to capture HDR images. I think this location was better suited to HDR because of the white salt and the darker mountains.

My photographic goal was to capture HDR images of the rock tracks on the playa with the mountains in the background. I used matrix metering and three frame bracket bursts  at the Racetrack and five frame bursts at Badwater all spaced at a stop apart to capture the range of light I was seeing. The Nikon D300 has a great feature that allows you to quickly set up your shots in 3. 5, or 7 shot brackets and to determine the amount of exposure difference in each frame.

I exported the images from Lightroom to Photomatix Pro to process the images using the tone mapping ability of the software to try to keep the images as close to natural as possible.

Below are three of the HDR images from the Racetrack Playa. You can click here to see all of my Death Valley images.

Please leave a comment and let me know what you think or if you have any questions.

Tweet This Post Facebook