Photo of the Day
Last Thursday night I shot my last Purdue baseball game of the season. This has been a fun year where I shot nearly every game. A few other events got in the way at the end of the season including the doubleheader on senior day. I loved covering the team though, and when I had the shots that I needed on my last night I set out to capture this sunset. I wanted a photo like this nearly all season, but the elements were never in my favor. Thankfully they all came together on the last night. Now that the Purdue home athletic season is over I find that I will have a lot of extra time on my hands. With a young baby I know that I will still be busy, but I also will have to find a way to fill that gap. Shooting an event is an adrenaline rush that I can’t really describe. It is hard to replicate that during the off season. The good news for you readers though is that the constant flow of sports pictures should die down. I am sure that a few will crop up from time to time, but this should be a summer of landscape work for me.
Technical Data
This is the photo that I talked about a few days ago when I showed my entire workflow in one 10 minute video. The video can be found below, and it shows how I go about making an image like this one. It all starts with capturing the image on scene. I knew that this was a very wide range of light so I made three exposures 2.5 stops apart. Back home I fused them together in Photomatix 5. I then took that 32 bit image back into Lightroom to work on it there. I had an idea when I started out on how I wanted this to look. The HDR Look preset by Matt Kloskowski was the way to go. I used the strong preset to give it a much grittier look that I have been liking lately. A few tweaks to different parts of the photo, and this one was ready to send to SmugMug. If you like the photo above click on it, and you will be taken to my SmugMug gallery where it is for sale.
Dave Wegiel Photography 