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This is taking the riverside dwelling experience to the extreme!
Pictured during Liz and my brief stopover in the village of Cong in Co. Galway in the west of Ireland, this unusual ruined stone cottage was an obvious target for a photo - well you couldn't NOT photograph it could you?
The scene itself illustrates one of the perennial problem for photographers - contrast. While my God designed eye/brain combo could take in details from all over this scene without the highlights blowing out or the shadows blocking up, my poor camera sensor just couldn't cope with the very high dynamic range.
What to do? Well I have several options in my arsenal for dealing with excessive contrast, which I'll discuss here in order of preference.
1. ND grad filters. Simple to use, reduces time spent post processing, but only really work with flat horizons so no good here as half the trees would be covered by the filter.
2. Multiple exposures for manual blending. Can cope with non-linear contrast changes but requires the use of a tripod and extra time in post processing. I was tripodless at the time so this was a no-no also.
3. Multiple exposures for HDR processing. Good for images that have complicated shadow/highlight areas but requires the use of a tripod and doesn't cope very well with movement between frames. I didn't have the necessary tripod with me and there were significant moving elements in the scene, so this method was also a no-no on this occasion.
4. Single exposure HDR processing. This is an HDR 'cheat', where a single RAW file is converted into two or more TIF files at different exposures and then HDR processed. This works OK when the single starting RAW file isn't too heavily blown out in the highlights or blocked up in the shadows, and avoids the problems of movement between frames caused by lack of a tripod or subject movement, but you don't have a rich source of data to work with as you would with multiple original images at different exposures.
So it was option 4 that I chose for this particular image, and though I maybe could have done better using the multiple exposure for manual blend option I'm still quite pleased with how the final result looks and feels.
A lovely afternoon in a beautiful place.
Filename - river cottage 01.jpg
Camera - Canon 5D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 24mm
Exposure - 1/200secs @ f11, ISO200
Location - Cong, Ireland
This image - 800x533px JPEG
Conversion - ACR & PS-CS2
Comments - HDR processing used to reduce contrast.
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