PC#5 - Photo #1

[chemlabrat]

These are two photos shot yesterday at my sister's house. She lives on the TN river and has a boat ramp/pier in her back yard, and most of her neighbors do as well. Sometimes some really interesting things wash up in her backyard, and it can make a fun place to metal detect. You get more sinkers than anything else though. The first pic is my entry. The second pic was just for fun. It doesn't meet the challenge, but I thought I could make an interesting play on words by calling it "Metal Detecting for Rays of Gold". Yeah, corny, I know. If interested, the first pic was taken by:

Setting up a tripod on the beachside. Set the mode to "Manual" and exposed at 2 stops below a good exposure (this exposed the sky that was white to the human eye that day), then took sequential shots ever stop until I was at 2 stops over a good exposure (exposing the highlights in the image). Then I took this series of 5 photos and combined in a high dynamic range program. I use a program called Photomatix for this, but Photoshop will do it as well. Then I ended up with everything you see in the photo all exposed like I wanted it, except I wasn't in the pic. Then, with the tripod in the same position, I took a few pics on timer using a flash with me in different poses. Then overlayed the pose I liked best on top of the HDR image I made and layer masked away everything except for myself. Then a few tonal adjustments later I ended up with the photo I have here. In my honest opinion, it's not that great of a photo, but I like playing with HDR and had a good time taking it.

"Beginners worry about equipment. Novices worry about composition. Masters worry about light."

[INDY]

Great photographs, I like them alot.