This is a HDR of the Twin Falls waterfalls at Springbrook National Park in the Gold Coast Hinterland. It was a very cloudy and very wet weekend, so I had to use HDR to prevent the sky from blowing out badly.
These falls are quite high and an impressive sight. If the weather were better I would have been keen for a swim in the pool. Maybe next time 
This was blended from 5 photos. To get the 5 shots, I set the camera exposure bias to -2.0 EV, then took 3 bracketed shots at /- 2.0 EV (giving -4, -2 and 0 EV) then quickly set the exposure bias to 2.0 EV and took 3 more bracketed shots (giving +4, +2 and 0 EV). I then have shots ranging from -4 to +4 EV in 2 EV steps. I delete 1 of the duplicate 0 EV shots and blend the remaining 5 in Photomatix.
This is a neat little trick if the normal +/- 2.0 EV bracketing is not enough for the scene being shot. In this case the white cloud above the waterfall was blown out in every shot except -4 EV.
Here is another HDR Panorama I took at Springbrook National Park on the weekend. These are Antarctic Beech Trees, which are quite rare, as you will notice if you read the wikipedia article. This shot was taken with the K200D, Pentax SMC DA 18-55 AL II kit lens, and Slik 500DX Pro tripod. It was raining lightly when I took the shot. I setup the tripod just on the inside of the fence which protects the trees from the path.
It was because I was so close that this had to be a panorama. I was not able to fit the base of the trees in the shot. I was also forced to use HDR for this shot due to the extremely bright white clouds behind the tree trunks. I did not want to lose the detail in the roots.
The shoot and processing details are as follows
- Shot in Pentax RAW (PEF)
- Imported into Lightroom 2.5
- Exported to 16 bit TIFF
- Exposures blended using Photomatix Batch Processing with Details Enhancer Tone Mapping
- Photomatix resulting images were then stitched using Autopano
- Resulting panorama was imported back into Lightroom 2.5
- Minor adjustments made in Lightroom
- Exported to JPG for Web
I haven’t posted for a few days as I was off exploring the world. A friend and I travelled to Springbrook National Park for a weekend of camping and photography, only to discover that the weather was against us. It rained very heavily most of the time, so not much photography happened!
Here are the first of the processed shots though.
This shot was taken using the Pentax DA 18-55 AL II lens @ 18mm. It is 3 HDR images stitched together (HDR’s were 3 images each @ +/- 2.0 EV). All shots were taken in Pentax RAW (PEF), imported to Lightroom 2.5, blended using Photomatix batch process with Details Enhancer (quite extreme one too!) and stitched using Autopano.
I also took another HDR panorama from the other side of the shed looking back to the bridge I took this shot from. This is the link to flickr
A Blog of my Photographic Journeys, Equipment, Techniques and Images.
