Fly Away Home

Photo of the Day

Today I will be on my way back home to Indiana. I am writing this over a week in advance so who knows how the trip went. Hopefully I have way too many good pictures from the trip so that I will need several weeks to show them all on here. For today’s photo though I chose a picture from just after we landed in Salisbury, Maryland on our way to Ocean City last year. I was at the front of the plane, and everyone else was in the back. I hurried up and got off the plane so that I could get this picture with my wide angle lens. I liked this shot for today because I will be flying out of Hayden, Colorado which has the code HDN. That same code is on the front of this plane. I love it when a plan comes together.

Technical Data

I actually struggled with this image. This was originally going to be a three shot HDR image, but I did not like how that turned out. I tried to bring the detail back in Lightroom for this shot, but it still did not look like the scene in real life. The problem there was that the eye sees much a much more dynamic range of light than my camera sees. Your eye can see 27 stops of light while the camera can only see five. That is why I originally wanted to make this an HDR picture. I used a couple of tools here to get all of the light where I remembered it being. This is the beauty of making pictures in the digital age. No longer do you have to chose what will be exposed properly. It all can be. I started off by sending a copy of the image to Topaz Adjust 5 for processing. I chose a copy of the file because Topaz will permanently alter the photo. This way I still have the original copy in Lightroom untouched. I applied the dramatic filter in Adjust 5 to bring out the beauty in the scene. From there I exported back to Lightroom so that I could finish the edit. I upped the highlight slider a bit as well as darkening my exposure. After that was all done my picture looked close to what I saw on the scene, and I was happy with my results.

SmugMug Link

Here is the photo above, but on my SmugMug site.