This beautiful spiral staircase is in the Old State Capital in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The wild colors come from a huge stained glass dome in the ceiling. I shot this with a 14mm lens and hand-held the HDR three frame exposures. I used two f/stop increments between shots and set the white balance on AWB which I only use for mixed lighting situations. I should have brought my tripod, but I assumed they wouldn't be allowed. I was wrong. Had I been using a tripod, I would have shot this with f/22 instead of f/2.8. I could have used more depth of field.
7 Comments
Jun 23, 2016, 9:35:11 AM
Jim - Not at all, Bob, as you can see. The only thing a 3 f/stop incremental setting does is lower the contrast.
Jun 23, 2016, 8:32:47 AM
Bob Turner - Hi Jim. As requested >Sag Harbor New York. I always believed a 3 stop increment would be much too dark and overexposed on the both ends of a three shot HDR
Jun 23, 2016, 8:04:12 AM
Jim - Hi Bob, Good question. May I use this question in the July issue of my free monthly eMagazine, Photo Insights? If so, I would need your city and state, please. To answer your question, as the contrast in the image increases, so does the f/stop increments. With extreme contrast, such as bright sun at mid-day, I use 3 f/stop increments.
Hi Rob, The ISO was 2500 in order to keep my shutter speeds high. They were in the range of 1/200. The algorithm in the HDR programs align the images, so when I hand hold and there is a slight misalignment, which there has to be, the software aligns the images very well especially -- and this is important -- when using a wide angle lens and the movement is very slight. Hand holding HDR with a telephoto doesn't work for exactly this problem -- too much movement during exposures.
Hi Bob V, Thank you. No specially processing in post except I minimized the yellow a little. The original looked too yellow-green.
Jun 23, 2016, 6:07:03 AM
BobTurner - I note that you have used 2 stop and 3 stop increments on recent examples of your HDR work. What decision guides your use of these increment settings compared to more traditional 1 stop settings.
Jun 23, 2016, 2:53:07 AM
Rob Smith - Looks pretty cool to me Jim! How do you hand hold for 3 shots - this is a bracketed shot using what shutter speed & ISO? Thanks!
Jun 23, 2016, 1:01:13 AM
Bob Vestal - I am on the same page as Rob and have the same two questions. Also, anything special in post?. This is a striking image.
Jun 23, 2016, 12:52:53 AM
Rob Smith - Looks pretty cool to me Jim! How do you hand hold for 3 shots - this is a bracketed shot using what shutter speed & ISO? Thanks!