Bryce Canyon Utah - HDR 01 - Rainbow Point

Bryce HDR 01 Jun 2009_DSC6512_3_4_5_6_7_8, originally uploaded by VancouverDoug.

Here is the first of many of the color shots taken while at Bryce Canyon last month.

I'll make it a point to post to this blog in a balanced way over the next few weeks. High Dynamic Range (HDR) is an incredible tool but it's like the icing on the cake. Too much icing and not enough cake can make your teeth hurt. After two hours this morning organizing my photo archive and then processing the first half a dozen of the HDR sequences I realized that the punch of HDR tends to decline as you view more and more images created with this technique. HDR is a great opening in other words but shouldn't be the whole show. I'll make sure to post photos from all three of my favorite photography food groups - Black and White (infra red), High Dynamic Range and Regular.

The results, even of the early HDR sequences, are quite stunning. My workflow for the images is Lightroom (organize the images) -> Photomatix Pro 3 (the HDR composite software) -> Nikon's Capture NX2 (final color and light balancing and dust bunny removal). While working on the HDR captures this morning I was able to flip between the views that all three applications had of the same image and I must admit - HDR does reveal what I did see in my mind's eye more than the regular captures do.

A great example (coming up in a later image) was the color of the sand between the trees on the slopes below the rust colored mesas. In the regular image the 'perfectly exposed' shot produces a light yellow, almost white cast to the sand. In the HDR image the sand matches the color of the higher level rock which is where the sand came from in the first place. HDR shows what I saw. The regular image shows what the camera saw.