I hope you don’t mind that I stretch a short moment into two posts, but Sunday was photographically unproductive, and besides, I really like these two images.
Juha Haataja recently asked about how much we rely on all the dynamic range our cameras can capture, and the point he made is right, normally what we get suffices, but these two images show why dynamic range is still important.
The image captured by the camera contained all the dynamic range that was possibly there to capture. Of course the sun will always burn out, but everything else was pretty accurate, only the distribution was wrong. I needed +2 EV for the ground in order to make it look like what I saw, and into that image I blended the original exposure. I could have used some HDR tone mapper to do the job, but for this kind of image I prefer to do it myself. The automatic algorithms are great, but they never get the sun right 🙂
Anyway. Raising exposure by 2EV brought up some noise in the landscape, but not too bad. This is of course due to the camera’s great dynamic range, and I guess it is these times when I really need the 14 bit capture. Forget about doing that with a JPEG.
The Song of the Day is still “Chasing The Light” from the 1989 album “Leningrad Cowboys Go America”. Hear it on YouTube.
Juha Haataja (2010-09-06)
You are right, this is quite a challenging situation - challenging even for the human eye. And beautifully expressive result!
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