Heading Out in About an Hour!

There's a 20% chance of thunderstorms at Bodie this afternoon, but from the look of the Mono Lake Web cam, it's going to take a lot more cloud buildup in the next 3-4 hours to bring the clouds up to the level we've enjoyed there in the past.

Our remaining Bodie workshops in 2013: http://www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/bodie-night-photography-workshops/

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New Images from Bodie State Historic Park
I'm adding to this album more shots from my September 22, 2012 visit to Bodie, which featured a thunderstorm, rain, rainbows, a nice sunset and eventually, some nice star shots.  I'm finally getting around to processing a few of the shots which seem to benefit from HDR processing, so most of these new images were produced using Photomatix.  

Digital cameras are less capable than film cameras as capturing shadow and highlight detail, so High Dynamic Range (HDR) software was developed to enable you to include lighter and darker exposures to improve the dynamic range of your results.  Unfortunately HDR has gotten a bit of a bad rap in the past for producing wacky results instead of improving realism.  Some photographers even failed to capture properly exposed images to correct blown highlights (the point of using the technique in the first place).  Fortunately the latest version of Photomatix and its interface to Adobe Lightroom for pre and post-processing goes a long way towards providing the control required to enable you to control the tool, instead of having the tool dictate your results and give them a generic, over-processed "HDR look" like everyone else's.  

I've written a few blog posts over the years on HDR, and here are a couple of the more recent ones:

HDRs: Good, Bad, or Something Else?
http://activesole.blogspot.com/2011/08/hdrs-good-bad-or-something-else.html

HDR-Friendly Workflow, Using Adobe Lightroom for Realistic Results
http://activesole.
blogspot.com/2011/03/hdr-friendly-workflow-use-lightroom-34.html

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