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.

Reflections

There is something truly magical about reflections.  We encounter them every day and yet when I see one in a landscape it still captures me.  I'm not sure if it is the symmetry or added depth that I like.  Add a sunset plus a reflection and you end up with something striking. 

Getting the perfect reflection in water can be very difficult as the water has to be ridiculously smooth.  The slightest disturbance can distort the image and take away from the effect.  Now this isn't always the case.  Some reflections look perfectly good even with some distortion. 

Our last trip to Gull Lake afforded me with an excellent chance to get a nice reflection with sunset.  After a few days of sitting on the dock only to have the clouds disappear or drop to the horizon I finally got a night where everything lined up just right.  The image below is a three panel stitched panoramic.  In reality since each panel was a nine frame HDR the image is composed of 27 different exposures.  I decided to use HDR for this because I really wanted to get some of the detail in the shore across the bay.  You can get a perfectly good sunset by underexposing the image slightly.  That gives you the rich colors in the sky while the foreground elements are usually in deeper shadow.   For this particular scene I wanted to try to preserve the image as I saw it while sitting on the dock with Mom.

I should add a big thanks to Mom for being a constant source of support and a frequent shooting companion.

As always prints are available here as well as the image in full resolution where  you can see much more detail.

New Blog!

Photography has always been a passion of mine. In the last few years I have been working to turn that passion into a career. Discussing techniques and equipment has helped me gain a better understanding of photography and has helped my overall image quality. I would like to do the same here. I will post images and discuss the equipment and techniques involved in capturing the moment. If you have topics that you would like to discuss please let me know either by email or in the comments section.

This image was taken from Mounds Park. It is one of my favorite spots to capture sunsets of the downtown St. Paul skyline. This is a nine exposure HDR processed in Photoshop CS5, Lightroom 3, and Photomatix Pro. The gear used was my Nikon D700 with a 24-70mm f2.8 at iso 200. I mounted the camera on my tripod because the nine exposures needed to be precisely lined up plus some of the longer exposures were too long to hand hold without camera shake. The last piece of equipment was a cable release. This allows me to control the shutter without physically touching the camera.

After importing the images into Lightroom the first step is to process the HDR in Photomatix Pro. From there I loaded the tonemapped file into Photoshop CS5 along with the nine component images. After masking out a few problem areas, a little dodging and sharpening, the image went back into Lightroom for final adjustments.

If there are any images that you like and want prints of check out my galleries at www.DanGerberPhotography.smugmug.com.  If you would like something custom please contact me and we will work towards what you want.