Stop For the Sunset

Photo of the Day

Tuesday night I was at the Boilermaker Soccer Complex to photograph the exhibition game between the Indy Eleven and the Chicago Fire. I started the game off by photographing from the roof of the stadium. After a short time shooting I was heading down the stairs to the field level when I saw just how great the sunset was behind the field. I paused for a moment to look at it, and then I made a picture of it. I actually made six pictures in two sets with HDR in mind. It has been a while since I knew that I would use HDR on a photo, but the dynamic range of light here called for it. Sometimes moments just fall into your lap. I was glad that this one did. This coming weekend I will be spending some time out here at the baseball field so maybe this is a good omen for how it will go.

Technical Data

This is a series of photos shot with HDR in mind. I made three pictures at +2, 0, and -2. I imported everything into Lightroom 5, and then I went through my game photos. When I saw the composition here I knew that it was the one. I included a bit more of the great sky than I did in the first one. Who wants to see a boring soccer practice field when you have a sky like that? The photos were then sent to Photomatix Pro 5 for tone mapping. The program did its job and gave me a 32 bit image that I could manipulate. In the past I would have sent that file into Lightroom to process it there. For this photo though I wanted to try some things out in the new Photomatix. I tried a few of Trey Ratcliff’s presets on it to see if anything worked for me. I found one that did, and I applied it. I then made a couple of tweaks inside of Photomatix before sending the image back into Lightroom. Inside of Lightroom there was just a big of clean up work to do. I cropped a little of the soccer stadium out of the image, and adjusted the white balance just a bit. I also added some clarity and contrast to the image. This was kind of like the old days of editing a photo, and I had a blast doing it. This was a great chance to try a little landscape work out with my 17-35mm lens.