After returning from Sacsayhuman, we treated to a fabulous sunset. Looking at the dynamic range, I knew that I would need to use HDR to adequately capture what I was seeing. My tripod was back in the hotel (resting from the travel, I guess), so I had to employ one of Barry Armer’s techniques—hand-held bracketed exposures. I braced myself against a lamp post and shot five exposures at one-stop increments (+2 to -2 EV).
Last week, I watched an interesting video by Kevin Kubota on [FRAMED] about post-processing HDR shots when you do not have a steady tripod. Essentially, he exports all of the exposures from Lightroom or Bridge into Photoshop as layers. He then aligns the layers within Photoshop and then exports the various layers back as individual files. He then runs his normal HDR program to convert all the exposures into an HDR image. I tried this on a couple HDR wanta-bes and found that it does seem to reduce the ghosting that you get with out-of-register images. If you are interested in watching the entire video you can find it here. (As a side note, Kevin Kubota has presented some good post-production techniques for Lightroom and Photoshop—you might want to check them out at [FRAMED]).
Today’s image is of La Catedral on the Plaza de Amas in Cuzco. The Plaza is the main gathering point for many tourist and residents throughout the day, and as a result, many people are moving always around in front of La Catedral—not the best conditions for using HDR. Solution: crop the people out! I just felt that trying to fix all the blur of people and cars would take too much times, especially since they are really not the main subjects of the photo.
Enjoy.
Impressive. The diagonal lines of the sky add so much to the overall image. Not sure that I agree with your crop. I would probably cropped out the back part of the church.
ReplyDeleteAnne
Stunning photo. I like it alot. I like the pano crop. How could you crop that great sky?
ReplyDeleteWhen I first looked at it, I was not sure about not including the base of the building, but then, I just sat back and said: WOW. Great sunset. That is all that counts.
ReplyDeleteDebbie
Beautiful.
ReplyDeleteTaylor
So many things, color, composition and cropping, work within this image that it is hard to find fault with anything. I do however wonder whether the the two main subjects, the church and the sunset, are competing with each other or are they supporting each other. Just a thought.
ReplyDeleteThe Professor