Spring Time in Wine Country

[Chris Hansen]

Headed out yesterday with Joe Benoit photographer extraordinaire looking for spring. We went looking for HDR images in particular.

Canon 50D
Tokina 18- 35 @ 24 mm
ISO 160
1/160sec @ f9.0
Manfrotto tripod w/3055 ballhead

HDR image composed of two RAW images processed in Photomatix and CS-4.

Just learning this HDR thing so all CCappreciated.

God's light and love to all,

chris

[denise ippolito]

Chris, The colors are so vibrant! The mailboxes look incredible!!! I would have liked to have seen a bit more of the road on the left. The vineyards look nice w/ the spring colors! Interesting perspective!

[Julie Kenward]

Chris, I've never done an HDR photograph so I can't really help you with that technique but I have seen quite a few and this one seems a bit fuzzy compared to other HDR's. Did you use Photomatrix or some other HDR program or was this in Photoshop?

As for the composition, I think the tree is a bit centered and there's a bit too much sky. I think this would have made a more interesting horizontal composition than a vertical - as Denise said, it would have been nice to have seen more of the road.

I do love the colors as well - I think you're on the right track...just need to figure out how to fine tune it!

[Paul Lagasi]

Hi Chris
First off ..going to research HDR....great image love the angle you get with wide lens, colors are surreal....agree with sky...would be interesting to see this as horizontal, having said all that .... maybe you can explain what you did to arrive at this image...but if this image is HDR give me more...Paul

After reading about this, you bracked exposure your image then sandwich them together or take 3 or more images at different exposures and sandwich them together, right?

Can you do this only with Photoshop? or do you also need Photomatix?

[denise ippolito]

Paul, You can do this with Photoshop-Alot of folks use Photomatrix Pro Tone Mapping also. I understand that when you do HDR work it generally takes away the contrast -so you may want to check your contrast carefully-If you are really interested in HDR-Go thru some of the landscape posts in that forum, you will see several HDR images and get a feel for what works. Hope that was helpful.

[Paul Lagasi]

Thanks Denise...another whole new world opened up here...never could figure out how they got those images...

[Jackie Schuknecht]

Like it Chris, might desaturate it a bit and crop a bit from the top.

[Gus Cobos]

Hi Chris,
I like this composition, it's different from your conventional horizontal capture...My suggestion would be to desaturate the mid tones just a tad, and to crop about 1/4 from the top...:cool:

[Richard Waas]

I agree with the comments above as to the cropping at the top. I love the colors, but I'm wild about wild colors!!