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Photo of the Day

A year ago today I started something that I both have enjoyed and regretted. I took my first bracketed set of pictures with the intent of turning them into HDR shots that day. I found a shot that I thought required HDR, and I proceeded to give it a try. I didn’t own any HDR software at the time so my shot had a nice watermark on it. That post can be found here. Other than that it really looked alright compared to some of the things that I would come up with shortly after that. HDR really is a process that it takes a while to master. The bad part for me is that I was learning the process with a picture a day blog in the middle of a photo 365 project. A quick look at my early HDR work makes me cringe. I am still learning the craft, but I think that I have come a long way for sure. I really do not like this shot now, but I felt that it would be good to go back to the beginning just to see what I would do this time.

Technical Data

This was edited with a different program than my first shot. I found the HDR Photo Pro trial version at the time, and it did produce a fine picture for me, but it gave me some terrible watermarks. I ended up going for the Photomatix Pro version that I have used ever since. Sometimes it pays to have some patience. I used Photomatix to process the first three shots. As I have lately I then took the 32 bit image that it produced and sent it over to Lightroom to edit. I like the sliders there a lot more, and I get a more realistic image. From there it was just tweaking the image until I got something that I could live with. As I said before I am not thrilled about this image, but it will do to mark the one year anniversary of my HDR imaging.