As I have mentioned, it is difficult to capture the Redwood forest in any kind of image. Part of the difficulty is simply the unbelievable scale, but most of it has to do with the range of light. It is relatively dark under the canopy, and yet the sun breaks through in brilliant shafts and patches. That is part of the magic. It is a world of light and shadow, populated by giants. On my up up through the Avenue of the Giants I tired the in-camera HDR on the SX50HS, hoping it would do a better job with the range of light. It did, but the lights, those sun shafts and patches, were still beyond the camera’s ability to render. On my last morning in Acadia, as I was waking up, I began to think about what is, to me, deep HDR. HDR works, if you are wondering, by taking three or more exposures at a range of values and combining them in software after the fact to produce an extended range image. Generally you have one normal exposure, one underexposed (dark) and one overexposed (too light). The software takes the highlights from the dark exposure and the shadows from the light exposure and combines them with the mid-ranges of the normal exposure. It can be over done, and too often is, producing scenes with skies that the eye has never beheld, or landscapes that look almost etched. The Redwood forest is, however, a classic case for HDR. I wondered if I could get better results than the in-Camera HDR provided by bracketing three exposures myself.

It turns out that such bracketing is really easy on the Canon SX50HS. I had planed to use the Exposure Compensation settings to dial down the exposure until I could see detail on the LCD in the highlights. That would give me my underexposure and then I could work from there. I determined that I needed at lest -3 EV (three stops) of underexposure for the highlights. However when doing that, I noticed that there was little symbol in LCD display that I had never paid any attention to. DISP. That generally means there are settings accessible by pressing the Display button. When I pressed it, up came an autobracketing setting that allowed me to set how far apart three autobracketed exposures are. You spin the control dial and two little pointers spread out across the Exposure Compensation scale. Alright! And, they spread from the point where you have Exposure Compensation set on the main scale. I was able to set Exposure Compensation to -1 and the autobracketing control to its widest spread and get three exposures at -3, -1 and +1. I did a few test shots and it seemed like it might give me the raw materials for some interesting HDRs of the Redwoods.

Of course for three exposures to be in perfect registration, so you can combine them in software, you have to use a tripod. My trusty Fat Gecko, shock corded, carbon fiber tripod was just the ticket. It weights under a pound but supports the Canon SX50HS like tripod weighing 10 times as much.

So I spent a couple of hours in Founder’s Grove taking HDR exposures. When I got back to San Francisco and my hotel for the night, I tried a couple of different HDR software solutions. PhotoMerge in PhotoShop Elements has an Exposure module that works okay, to produce the raw HDR image, but then you have to do the Tone Mapping using standard PSE tools. Tone Mapping? Just as the scene contained a wider range of tones than the sensor could capture, your HDR image contains a wider range of tones than a computer screen can display, or a printer print.Tone Mapping is the process of taking your extended range image, which generally looks pretty flat and uninteresting on the computer screen, and mapping the tones so that they look natural when displayed or printed. It is overcooked Tone Mapping that gives HDR a bad name, and produces those surreal effects. The goal, or at least my goal, when  Tone Mapping is to produce as natural a look as possible. My preferred HDR software, Dynamic Photo HDR, gives you lots of very intuitive control over how the tones are mapped.

And even then, I take the images into Lightroom for final processing. Did it work. You can be the judge, based on the image above, and others that I will post over the next days, but I am pretty satisfied. The images I got from Founder’s Grove go further toward capturing the reality of the place than any I have managed before. They are not perfect by any means, but they are satisfying!