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.
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.
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.
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!