After writing my post up last night about how I was going to get this blog back on track in the coming weeks, I got pretty pumped up. As a result of getting pumped up, I’m getting the blog back on track today.
The photograph I’m putting into this post was taken back in October of 2010. I’d been living in Montreal for a few months and my parents were up from Maine visiting. My dad and I decided to get up before sunrise and walk up to the top of Mont Royal (not a fun walk). It was a wicked cold morning for October and the entire area was practically empty. After lugging my gear up the hill, I set up shop and did my best to make getting up early and enduring the cold worth it.
Montreal:
The image is an HDR. I used Nik HDR Efex to process the HDR, and then I finished it with Nik’s Viveza 2, Color Efex, Sharpener, and Dfine. This is actually the second edition of this image, because I managed to lose the original HDR file I made back in October. Although I like this rendition better than the first, I learned a valuable lesson about backing up images.
When actually capturing the image, I distinctly remember just standing there with my gear, measuring the situation and deciding what kind of final product I was looking for. When shooting landscapes, I have to know what my final product is going to be, is it going to be an HDR, or is it going to be a single exposure? In this situation, I knew I wanted a nicely-exposed city, and I wanted a nicely-exposed sky. Now whether or not either the sky or the buildings (foreground) are nicely exposed, I’m not too sure, but I knew that I was going to have to work with an HDR to get the image I wanted. Now that I knew what kind of image I wanted, I retrieved the appropriate lens (Nikon 24-70mm) and composed the image. The observation area up on Mont Royal has a lot of branches poking up over the railing, so you have to be aware of that and check the edges of your frame before taking the shot. So if you’re routinely finding little branches or distractions hanging out on the edges of your images, no matter what you’re trying to shoot, try and build the habit of checking the edges before every shot. If you really concentrate on that for a bit, it’ll become second nature and you’ll just do it before every capture. So now that I’ve decided on what I want my final image to look like, picked the correct lens for the shot, and checked the edges of the frame for distractions, it’s time to lock my tripod into place and finally set my camera to bracket five frames and fire off the five frames. Some people may scoff at HDR, “it’s not real photography,” they may say. But the truth is, you go through the same process when making HDR images as you do with other digital images. Ultimately, you’ve got to know what you want when you’re out in the field, and you’ve got to find the best way to get to that final image. Sometimes it’s with a traditional exposure, sometimes it’s with HDR, whatever technique works for you and your vision is what’s right.
I’ll be making a new post soon with some more current images, and I’ll be working on trying a new format out. Until then, happy shooting!
