[jason@sun ~]$: The Solaris junkie finds a home

As the sun set this evening I shot a few frames from by back porch.  There's a church right behind our house.

 

If there's not much wind (or no leaves!) you can make passably good HDR images hand-held.  You've still got to go all-manual, and my focal length wasn't right, so the church is a little blurry.

Still... HDR makes clouds cool.

Last evening tropical storm Hanna was approaching Frederick, MD.  Hoping for some interesting clouds and good light, I drove up to High Knob at Gambrill State Park.

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I got there about 30 minutes before twilight -- plenty of time for me to set up on the Middletown lookout point.  I got my Manfrotto tripod nice and secure on the stone wall.

Last week I bought a copy of The HDRI Handbook by Michael Freeman.  This is the only high dynamic range (HDR) book that I've been able to find that's more substance than fluff.  (Actually, it's great.  I'll post a full review of it later.)  I've been anxious to try out the techniques this book describes.  So I started shooting sequences of images -- 7, actually, bracketed at .7 stops.

Middletown, MD -- taken facing West at High Knob

I took these right about 20 minutes before sunset.  This has got to be as good as this light is going to get, I thought.  After snapping a few more images, I hit the road.

 

Middletown, MD -- taken facing South at High Knob

On the way home I stopped off to buy some Blue Moon.  As I got out of the car I looked at the sky -- it had exploded into amazing reds and purples.

Lesson learned: stay at the site until the sun goes down.  Always.

So bummed.

At least I got a chance to try out some HDR tricks.  Today I bought the full version of Photomatrix Pro.  The two images above were generated with Photomatrix, then tweaked in Photoshop CS 3.  I used my Nikon D300 with the Nikkor 18-200 DX VR, circular polarizer, and my Manfrotto tripod and ball-head.