I wish, of course, that there was some way to capture the smell of new mown hay…but I will have to rely on your memory for that. There was a bit of summer evening haze rising off the marsh and forest beyond the field, but I like the evening light, the sky, the tree in the foreground, the texture of the shadowed bark, and the light coming through the leaves. I like the fine un-mown grass in the foreground and the texture of the stubble field. And I like the way the hanging branches frame the pines in the middle distance.

Because of the wide range of tones, from bright sky and sun-lit field to the tree trunk in full shadow (the sun is directly behind the tree trunk) and the bushes at the bottom in deep shadow…this shot is only possible via HDR: in this case the in-camera HDR on the Nikon Coolpix P500. When set to Backlight/HDR mode the camera takes a number of images very rapidly (almost instantaneously), and then combines them in-camera for extended dynamic range before writing them to the card as a jpeg. In most cases, the result is way too flat, but it can be processed to good effect in Lightroom with a combination of Recovery, Fill Light, Blackpoint adjustment, and Contrast to produce a result very like you would get from 3 or more exposures processed in Photomatix or other HDR software. I find that they process better in Lightroom if I apply another layer of in-camera processing…in this case, a low level of Quick Retouch…before I upload the image to my laptop.

This particular image is, after all that, very close to a natural eye view of the scene, with what amounts to a dynamic range at least beginning to approach what the eye can see. Of course, your monitor (or mine for that matter) can’t reproduce the range of the human eye either, so clearly the results are only an approximation of nature…but satisfying, imho, all the same.

Nikon Coolpix P500 at 31mm equivalent, f4.5 @ 1/800th @ ISO 160 (nominal exposure…but of course there was the in-camera processing on top of that).

Processed as above in Lightroom.