Blog

For the first 3 years of shooting landscape photography, I have struggled with handling the dramatic range of light that one can encounter especially with sunrise and sunset shots. I first tried to average out the range of stops in exposure between the highlights and shadows to get a descent image that I could work with in post processing. This proved to be a very hard thing to do and most of the time produced blown out highlights or shadows with a lot of noise. There just had to be a better way for a newbie photographer with limited resources.
Somewhere as I was venturing through the internet, I came upon something called HDR photography. Taking usually 3 or more exposures and merging them together in post with a dedicated software. Photomax Pro was the software that everyone was talking about. This software did a pretty good job of aligning the images and reducing any ghosting. The main issue I had at first was controlling the desire to crank up the dials and wind up with an over the top image. After some getting used to Photomax, I was able to produce a somewhat natural looking image, but I still thought there had to be a better way.
Back to the internet and Youtube. I came upon a video tutorial by Matthew Norris that explained how to take 3 exposures of an image, 1 metered by the camera, 1 for the highlights and 1 for the shadows, and using luminosity masks in photoshop you could manually blend them together to get a natural looking HDR image. This video has really changed the way I shoot and post process my landscape images now. If you are also having troubles with getting exposures right in tough scenes, give this process a try. Here is the Youtube video that changed the way I think with my photography now.

Winter has set in to the low country of South Carolina. Well for most other people, this weather would be called early Spring. But for us local landscape photographers, it lowers the humidity so we get some stunning color in the sunrise/sunsets here. The sky is so clear this time of year. Something that in a few short months will all change when the humidity hits 85% and above. This time of year forces me to carry my camera in my truck all the time. There is always that stunning morning color that a sunrise can bring on my way into work or the evening light can just explode right at sunset. Well off to work and hoping for a quick stop for some major color.