Tim had a few HDR threads for the ToL so I thought I would add my own. ; I think the clouds and time of day helped. Expand for larger version. [expando]http://www.sthomasphotos.com/photos/803230920_4PYWa-XL.jpg[/expando]
Neat. ; I'm getting an odd effect from it. ; I look at it and I tend to think of it as something like a painting or something, I don't perceive it as a picture. ; I don't really get the impression of HDR, I get the impression of "it's not a photograph". My take on it is that the sky seems inappropriate, though. ; The bright colors suggests sunlight, or perhaps a dramatic sunset, the clouds look incongruous in the context of the appearance of the lighting and the bold colors.
Thanks, Jeff! ; I've had a hard time catching the ToL in good lighting over the years. Dan, HDR does tend to polarize people as to if they like it or not. ; In this case, I do like the clouds as it makes the lighting more dramatic for me. ; I look for such lighting all the time when the Sun lights up the foreground with dark clouds in the background. ; I have lots of photos of the ToL with Florida blue sky's. ; Would I have liked it better with clouds being colored by a setting Sun, you betcha! ; However, at WDW, sometimes we don't have the luxury of waiting for the light as I had to get over to MK for a dining reservation with my family. ; I tried using various settings in Photomatix. ; Some more realistic with others totally off the wall and really liked how this looked. ; Maybe not photo-realistic but colorful and fun. ; Thanks for your comments, Dan. ; Here is a photo of the same scene:
Agreed. ; I wasn't going to say anything at first because I don't want it to seem like I'm just criticizing all of your HDR shots. ; Again, I think this is something that is typical of HDR processing: "storm clouds" even on sunny days. ; I know you can't do layers, but how I would solve this problem if you could is to layer the original image on top of this one, and mask the HDR image's sky.
^So that is an unprocessed (or minimally processed) photo of the HDR image above? ; In that case, I take back what I said--you really did have 'storm' clouds and a beautifully lit tree at the same time. ; Nothing processing wise you can do to fix that (IMO) that would really make it look any more natural than what you already did. Nice work!
Thanks, Tom. ; As the Pixelmania! gang will confirm, there was a lot of clouds around that day. ; The Sun had just gotten low enough with a clearing sky to the west to light up the tree. ; This was taken around 3:30pm on December 5 with sunset occurring about two hours later. ; During the trip, when I saw subjects with a lot of light and dark areas, I put my camera in bracket mode and took three shots. ; Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. ;
