Night HDR

HDR has quickly become one of my favorite ways to capture difficult dynamic light situations.  On our last trip to Walt Disney World one of my main goals was to work on my HDR technique at night.  One of the more challenging locations was Cinderella's Castle.  At the time it was decorated with hanging lights that, from a distance, made it look as if the castle was frozen.  Adding to the difficulty was the castle changes colors in somewhat short intervals.

In the first couple nights I was out shooting and processing I found that the skies were coming out looking rather terrible.  They were very noisy and filled with strange color artifacts.  There were a couple ways I found that helped with the situation.  On some later shots of Spaceship Earth I added some positive exposure compensation to try and expose the sky better.  The other way was to mask in a sky that looked better and fit the over all scene. 

In the picture below I did mask in a different sky because the rest of the image worked pretty well after running it through Photomatix.  I did have to fix some of the highlights that were a little blown out and remove a couple people that decided to linger in frame during the shot.  Now that it is done I think the final image works pretty well.  The dark sky keeps the attention on the castle.  The pathway that leads up to the castle makes a nice leading line to draw your attention from the bottom of the image right up to the castle.