Sunday, December 2, 2012

WOW!

ISO 200, f/20, 0.8 seconds, 19mm
  I have been renting a Canon 5D Mark III for the past 4 days and all I can say is WOW!
  I shot some basketball, a wedding, and this afternoon I shot some nature shots over in the Cherokee National Forest along River Rd. Even though I didn't even touch the surface of the capabilities of this phenomenal camera, I learned enough to know that I will own one someday.
  There are a ton of things about it that I was impressed with. The full frame sensor, the high ISO quality, the amazing focusing. The list goes on and on.
  I played around with something this afternoon though that just blew me away. In-camera HDR. Now I know there are a lot of cameras out there that have this functionality. But I have not experienced it until now. On top of all of the incredible stuff, this was incredibly fun to play around with. You can autobracket +/- 1, 2, & 3 EV into an HDR on the camera and it will shoot the brackets and blend them in a separate shot. There are 5 tone-mapped settings from a natural setting to extremely painterly settings. You can toggle that it takes an HDR on one single or shot or that it stays on with every shot you frame up. I really liked the tool and enjoyed using it.
  With a beauty of a sunset starting to unfold I stopped and set myself up on a bridge that spanned the Tellico River that allowed me to have a great vantage point to the sunset and a small reflection of it on the river.
  I was patient enough to stay until the pinks and oranges were striking the clouds that streaked overhead and and fired off a few sets of brackets until the color passed on by.
  Now one thing that I learned form FADE TO BLACK posted by Richard Bernabe is that even if you use HDR, that you still need to keep in mind the actual tonal range of the scene and that even though you can expose the foreground in the HDR, it may be better to let the shadows of the scene still be a silhouette. I kept that in mind for this shot and just let the trees and shoreline stay black and actually made them darker in Lightroom.
  Doing this let the sky and the color of the sunset be accented instead of the boring dead trees detract from it. I let the HDR blend the colors going on in the sky in the natural mode in the camera and they really stood out against the dark hourglass shape of the treeline and it's reflection.

1 comment:

  1. Beautiful image, Jerry. Colors are really nice and your use of the dark tree lines really enhances the sky effect. Nice one!

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