Topaz Lake Sunrise, 6:57 am Saturday, January 11

This photo was taken only 3 minutes after the last one I posted from this morning's sunrise, but the orange sunrise light had spread quite a bit in that short time.  In a single exposure some of the highlight detail was getting lost, and the foreground rocks were nearly black as well, so I ran three exposures through Photomatix HDR software to recover the highlight and shadow detail.  Ironically, "High Dynamic Range" software has a reputation for producing low dynamic range images, when heavy-handed use leads to garish images with large solid splotches of color with lost detail.  That reputation is not entirely deserved though, since careful use can often result in highlight and shadow detail being improved instead of destroyed.
Exposure and processing details
Canon 5D Mark III with 16-35mm lens at 24mm focal length
Cokin #121 3-stop graduated neutral density filter
Bracketed exposures of .5, 1.3 and 3.2 seconds, f/16 at ISO 100 
Post-processed in +Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5.2, Photomatix 5.0
White balance was set to 5412.  I adjusted exposure, brightness, whites and shadows (contrast, clarity, vibrance, saturation were all left at 0), then I used the Lightroom plug-in from HDRsoft to create an HDR file and transfer a 16-bit TIFF file back to Lightroom.  

To see more photos from this album:
https://plus.google.com/photos/+JeffreySullivan/albums/5675675387196096801?sort=1

Blog: www.MyPhotoGuides.com
#HDR    #landscapephotography    #sunrise    #Nevada   #nvmaglove   #Canon    #DSLR

Topaz Lake Sunrise Saturday, January 11, 2014 6:57am –
The surface of the lake was a little more calm than yesterday, so we had better reflections of the sunrise light on the clouds.

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