Sun Rays

I've always been fascinated by the shafts of light coming down from the clouds.  They seem to make any situation more interesting. On a late evening I was out at Mounds Park shooting sunsets when the sun started to peak out from underneath the cloud layer.  For just a few moments these sun rays, some call them God beams, shot out across the sky.  Thankfully I was well prepared and was ready to shoot the scene.

For this scene I was working on my HDR landscapes.  Not really knowing how they would turn out I shot the series and hoped for the best.  Once I got home I processed the image and the shafts of light looked just as they had when the picture was taken.  There are a lot of people that don't like HDR.  I think most of these people don't like it because it is easy to over process the image resulting in a surrealistic unnatural look.  For me HDR is a useful tool for difficult lighting situations. 

Here is why I like HDR.  The combination of the human eye and brain is much better at dealing with contrast range and tonal range than any camera on the market.  You can see this easily by standing indoors and looking out a window into bright sunlight.  With the combination of your eyes and brain you can see the detail in the much darker interior as well as the scene out the window.  Now try to capture that in a single exposure and you'll likely get a properly exposed outside scene and a very underexposed indoor scene.  This is because your camera meters off the very bright exterior and doesn't have the capability to capture the range of light in the scene.  Now you could take an exposure of the exterior and another of the interior and combine them but that is a lot of extra work.  For a scene like this you determine how many exposures you need, fire them off, run them through Photomatix (or similar program) and many times you are left with a reasonably good image.  There will be some cleanup or other adjustments to do in Photoshop to finish the image but overall you can get pretty good results right after minimal processing.  Personally I like to keep my HDR's as realistic as possible. The goal is to reproduce what the scene looked like when you were there.  With practice and learning materials you can get very quick at processing scenes.