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Eric Virkler
02-05-2010, 04:12 PM
I went to Colorado this summer and spent one sunrise at Maroon Bells. The contrast was too great between the sunlit mountains and the flowers, but I've gotten away from using a graduated neutral density filter. I took 3 bracketed exposures with the intent of someday learning how to do HDR. Well, someday is here. I finally learned how to do photomatrix last month and here's my first attempt. Please let me know how you think I did.

Thanks.

Eric Virkler
Faces of Nature Photography
www.ericjvirkler.com (http://www.ericjvirkler.com)

Dave Mills
02-05-2010, 04:43 PM
Hi Eric, Nice use of hdr but I wouldn't give up completely on a GND. The mountain is beautifully lit but when I was positioning myself to take this shot I might have done a few things. I would either have used the pond as a foreground or not put it in at all. I also would have tried to get a group of flowers that were fairly full that covered most of the immediate foreground(if possible of course)
I did some cropping of the image and lightened the shady areas a bit.

Dave Blinder
02-06-2010, 09:33 AM
Nice work Eric. I like the lighting and beautiful sky. I agree with having more flowers in the immediate foreground.

Eric Virkler
02-06-2010, 10:58 AM
Good points Dave, thanks for the advice. It's amazing what becomes obvious once someone points it out. I like your use of cropping also. Thanks.

Eric

Julie Brown
02-06-2010, 02:35 PM
Hi Eric,
I like the colors and the placement of the mountains here, but I think your transition from the FG could be brighter. There seems to be a loss of details in the darks. I use LR Enfuse and its OK. I just purchased a Singh Ray 3-stop soft 84x120mm GND filter to get better results in-camera.

Morkel Erasmus
02-07-2010, 01:59 PM
nice scene, but Dave's pointers provide good ideas for a return trip. I also like the detail he extracted from the shadows in his repost. you have some glorious mountain ranges in the Americas!

Eric Virkler
02-09-2010, 10:26 PM
Thanks for the help everyone, I'll guess I'll have to go back and try a little harder.
Eric