Reflections of the rising sun

The last of my series of shots from Sandycove, taken last Sunday morning, is quickly becoming my favourite, especially since I looked at a print of it yesterday.  This shot is very similar to the top right hand corner of the image I posted on Monday and was taken from the same vantage point, but with a lens at 50mm rather than 17mm.  However where Monday’s image was a composite of a number of different frames, each taken with different shutter speeds, this image is from a single frame.  But that doesn’t mean it’s not a composite.

In fact it is, as I took that single frame into Aperture, and generated two other exposures from it.  I them used Photomatix to merge these three exposures.  My name for this technique is pseudo-HDR because I think true HDR processing uses different source images, but this technique is all the same an extension of the same concept.  I’m taking advantage of the fact that I’m shooting in RAW and so can process the RAW file to different exposures.

There are other similar but more traditional means of processing images that landscape photographers have been using for a long time – exposing once for the sky and again for the foreground, and then merging the images in post-processing is a common technique and one that even pre-dates digital photography.  I guess digital photography has made these things easier.

My experiments with HDR are almost consistently coming down in favour of this pseudo-HDR approach over the muliple-frames method.  Of course a big benefit of this over traditional HDR is that, because the processing only requires a single image to start with, I can try it out on anything I shoot even if I didn’t have this particular treatment in mind at the time of shooting.

I received a message on Facebook last night from my wife’s uncle, Paul, saying it would be useful and instructive to see the unprocessed image alongside the processed one for my blog posts.  It’s something I had been thinking about too, and although I’m not likely to post the unprocessed shot for every single image I post, it’s probably no harm to do it on occasion.  On the right is the straight-out-of-camera RAW file (with no adjustments whatsoever apart from a straight JPEG export in Aperture) for the photo above.  If you click through a larger version will open in a new window.  Comparing the two images you’ll see how the pseudo-HDR processing brings out detail throughout the frame, but what’s important to note is that it is detail that is already there.

The other processing on this shot was to increase the contrast a little, cool down the colour temperature to bring some blue to the sky and the water, and straighten it to get the horizon level, as getting the tripod level on the rocks was near impossible.