1/10/2012: Nubble Light in Morning Light

When I went looking for the Snowy Owl reported at Nubble Light last Saturday, I went early. Early is not the best time to photograph the Light itself. The light is behind the Light, so to speak, or off to the south of it considerably, and you get shadows across the face of the buildings and the slope of the island. This shot, while it holds some interest in itself, was helped along considerably by the Dynamic Photo HDR application after the fact.

DPHDR, in my limited experience of it so far, does an excellent job of tone-mapping a single .jpg file to simulate a true multi-exposure HDR image…and it does it without the obvious artifacts of some other tone-mapping software. (It does, of course, produce conventional HDRs from multiple files, but I have not experimented with that yet.)

Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent field of view. f7.1 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 250. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.

The file was processed in DPHDR, then taken into Lightroom for final processing…Fill Light, Blackpoint, Clarity, and a touch of Vibrance. There was a reddish lens flare (the sun is just out of the frame), over the right end of the island which required some treatment. I desaturated the flare using the selective desaturation tool, then painted a Local Adjustments region over the area and pumped up Clarity and Contrast.

The result is, I think, striking…a bit on the hyper-real side (click for more on hyper-real imaging)…but powerful enough to make up for it.

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