Anatomy of a Shot - Letchworth

Great Bend at sunset

I had scouted this location the evening before, having made the shot you see here. Since the view is to the east I knew it would be much better at sunrise, although this version stands up well on its own. I arrived a good 45 minutes before the sun was up to get in place and have everything ready. Given the very high dynamic range of the scene (bright sky, dark foreground) I knew one exposure was not going to cut it, and in fact three was barely enough to record the range of light in the scene. As many of you (or the few of you who read this) may suspect this is an HDR image composited from five exposures. (I am a fan of HDR as a process, but I don't like the HDR "look" that is so prevalent these days). The sky was so bright relative to the foreground that I also used a 2-stop soft graduated neutral-density filter, something I carry in my arsenal but rarely use these days. The low light and smaller aperture necessary for depth of field meant that the entire time required to obtain five bracketed exposures was several seconds. Fortunately there was little wind this particular morning, otherwise things would have been much more difficult.

I always shoot in RAW, so on the processing end I converted each RAW file to a 16 bit TIFF file and then ran them through Photomatix to obtain the HDR image.

While this was a somewhat technically difficult shot, it by no means was unusual. Shooting at the edge of light often requires these steps.

Here are the particulars:

5 exposures, separated by one stop (-2, -1, 0, +1, +2)

f/11

focal length 24mm

ISO 250

You can never go back (and sometimes that's a good thing)

Last week my wife and I had the occasion to visit Houston, our former home of ten years. It was my first time back in over four years. Living in Houston never agreed with me, it's nothing against the city, just contrasting personalities. Good things did happen while I lived there, however. I met my wife in Houston, and it is also where I learned photography. I am self taught (which probably sometimes shows), and I largely learned my craft taking photos each spring of the wildflowers in the ranch lands between Houston and Austin. For that reason that area will always be special to me. At work I was known (not among the bosses) for contracting what I called "bluebonnet fever" each spring, taking a sick day here and there to go and photograph the wildflowers. Such dedication to my job. A model employee.

On this recent visit we were able to take a drive and visit former photographic haunts. I didn't bring my camera with me, but we did have my wife's new Nikon 1 J3 ILC (interchangeable lens camera). Below are two photos I made with this camera, my first wildflower photos in six years. With no tripod I was limited in what I could do, but they came out nice nonetheless. ILC cameras are the new rage, offering DSLR (or near DSLR) quality photos in a much smaller camera body.

Coreopsis

Bluebonnets

My wife came across a greeting card still in circulation that has my photo on it.