# Winter Morning Sunrise in Ireland



## achtungbarry (Jun 10, 2010)

Taken near Carton House,  Maynooth, Ireland

HDR from 3 exposures

I'd love to hear your feedback on this one. Here are the details of how I took and processed the shot: 


 -2    0    +2

 f22

 ISO 100

I took this photo on the grounds of Carton  House in Maynooth during an outing with my photography club. Normally  when I go to Carton, I photograph the beautiful boat house on the other  side of the river in the left of the shot. On this particular morning  however, it was the cool winter light casting beautiful shadows on the  ground and creating wonderful textures on the surfaces it reflected off  that grabbed my attention.

This scene was a perfect candidate for HDR  (High Dynamic Range) photography as it allowed me to preserve all the  details of the sky during sunrise as well as the shadows and textures in  the foreground. A single photograph would have left much of the  foreground as a silhouette.
Firstly I put my camera on the tripod in  order to ensure a perfectly sharp shot. I set up so that the sun was  behind the tree to prevent too many blown out highlights and to the  right of the path so that the path would lead into the shot from the  bottom left corner in a diagonal across the scene. 

I used an aperture of f22 to ensure that  the scene would be sharp from foreground to background. I set the ISO to  100 to keep noise to a minimum (which is even more of an issue when  shooting for HDR). I then set the auto exposure bracketing to   -2   0    +2.
Now I like to have a human element in my shots but unfortunately  on this morning there were few people around and the others were off  photographing the beautiful river house. To overcome this I set the 10  second timer and then ran down the path in order to be provide the human  interest myself........much to the amusement of my photography club  friends.
Luckily the Canon 40D takes the 3 bracketed exposures  automatically when the timer is on so all I had to do was set up, click  the shutter and get into position. It was important to stay perfectly  still for the 3 exposures in order to prevent ghosting during post  procesing.

I  converted the 3 RAW files to TIFFs in Lightroom and then used Photomatix  to merge the 3 shots to HDR. I then finished off the processing in  Photoshop. HDRs by their very nature lack contrast so I like to add some  contrast back in during processing. The great thing about HDR is that  because all of the tonal detail from shadows to highlights is present in  the scene, you have total control over the contrast.

Thanks to HDR I was able to preserve all  the detail in the sky during sunrise as well as the foreground detail.


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## Bynx (Jun 10, 2010)

An absolutely spectacular shot. Its brings a tear to my eye. Thats as close to a perfect picture as Ive ever seen. Pixel perfect. And a nice explanation too.


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## myshkin (Jun 10, 2010)

Great shot. I really love it. What was your shutter speed on this? Was your 0 exp under exposured?


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## achtungbarry (Jun 10, 2010)

myshkin said:


> Great shot. I really love it. What was your shutter speed on this? Was your 0 exp under exposured?



Thanks for the kind comments so far. I don't have access to what shutter speeds I used right now but I'll find out and let you know and yes the middle exposure was slightly underexposed to prevent blown highlights.


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## Provo (Jun 10, 2010)

This is one of those HDR that has a deep impact and makes you think
simply by looking at it this came out superb thanks for sharing such an awesome inspiring image well done.:thumbup:


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