Chapter 3 - Photograph a High Contrast Scene and Apply HDR

[Henriette]

The first image is a follow-up to the same image that I posted in Chapter 1 except this time the image was process in HDR.  The first image as well as the second were taken in my backyard.  The lighting was quite challenging.  The sun was just out of the picture in the upper left and followed the back of the trees.  The cloudy sky didn't leave much room for blue sky and the lighting was quite soft.  There was a hugh amount of shade in addition.  I do like challenges so thought let's see what we can do.  Because of the lighting (light and dark) I had more success using manual.  My starting point was to go just one stop below any blinking lights appeared on the histogram and to keep opening up the shutter one stop at a time till half the image was full of blinking lights.  I used Photomatix to process the images.  In Photoshop Ninja Noise was used as well as sharpening and a bit of levels.  The only trouble I had were two things:  Chromatic aberration (branches against white sky) and a purplish blue sky (fixed a bit in ACR)