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HDR Self Portrait During Sunset with the Rocky Mountains - Fountain, Colorado
Imagine waking up to this view of the Rocky Mountains every morning. Better yet, imagine a long day at work then relaxing here with a cold beer! Not to rub it in, but I had a chance to experience both :). My visit to Colorado was a pleasant one. Unfortunately there wasn't much snow. Just white patches of ice where the Sun couldn't reach. I went there hoping to photograph an ice storm. But I think I would have had better luck in Florida. And I mean this literally, cause after I left Florida a cold snap hit that froze the entire state. It seems my traveling luck is just too good.
Enough of about the trip, let's talk about this photo. This was taken with 4 exposures. The first 3 exposures was shot without me. I mainly focused on capturing the landscape and surrounding environment for HDR. The fourth exposure was focused on me using a flash for fill light. I merged the first 3 exposures using Photomatix. Then I layered the fourth exposure on top of the merged HDR image in Photoshop. I masked everything out in the fourth exposure but me. This is the technique I've been using to shoot my self portraits and it's been working well. However I'm not happy with how the lens distorted my body in this image. But I am happy with the overall results.
Location: Fountain, Colorado
Camera Used: Canon 5D Mark1
Lens Used: Canon 17-35mm f/2.8L USM
Camera Settings: ISO 200, Program Mode, f/2.8 @ 2 second, AEB +2/0/-2, Image Shot in JPG
Processing Technique: HDR using 4 exposures with 3 exposures merged using Photomatix. The 4th exposure was layered on top using Photoshop. Topaz Adjust was used to enhance the details. Final HDR image processed in Photoshop CS4. Scroll to the bottom of this page to download original exposures and settings used to create this photo.
Processing Time: 2 hour
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Download Original Exposures and Settings:
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| captain-kimo-hdr-colorado-fountain-patio-sunset.zip | 483.08 KB |
Awesome Kimo, this new technique is something I will begin to experiment with. Thank you for posting your work flow and image details, information like this is so valuable to the novice photographer.
Thanks Steve, I'm just doing my part to help other photographers as others have helped me.
Great pic... I really like the red glow around the deck, what was the source of all the red light, did you gel a strobe?
About the lens distortion.. I run into this all the time at work, any object very close to a wide angle lens suffers badly from this.
My solution is to get a little more of the image in the frame than I want, then in photoshop I use, Filter>>Distort>>Lens Correction to fix the problem, and then re-crop the edges!
It has worked really well for me!
Here is a 30 second quick fix from a screen capture of the image above, but with a wider shot and a couple a minutes you can get usually get almost perfect lens distortion correction!
http://s850.photobucket.com/albums/ab62/cgsouders/
Charles, the red cast is coming from the indoor tungsten lights. My white balance was set for day light when I was shooting the 3 exposure for HDR. When I shot myself the white balance was on flash. I tried to fix the distortion using the method above but it feels like I lose the impact of the shot when I do. It's a catch 22!
Great shot, the colors are awesome and you found a great location!
However, I think I would have preferred it, if your flash had a reddish foil on it to match your color a bit more to the light surrounding you.
Thanks Malte, the color balance doesn't bother me as much as the distortion does. But I know what you mean about the red cast.
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