I was out this evening with my camera and tripod just having fun. I find it incredibly relaxing to come up with something interesting to shoot without having to travel to Tibet or some other exotic faraway in the process.
One of the photos that came out quite nicely was one taken of my house. The sun was just setting so there was a nice range between the lights and the darks; the warm light coming from inside added to the atmosphere.
Below are the 3 exposures:
The first is the natural picture; 18mm f/3.5 0.8sec ISO 400. On close up it is a lovely picture but it is missing that little something special. The second two pictures are the underexposure and the overexposure (2ev apart).
The images were mixed with photomatix and the following are two options I could have chosen as a final tone-mapped result.
This first option is lovely but is bordering a little on what I think of as bad HDR. There is a a touch of artificiality in the colours and the light aura around the tree is not good form. However for the purposes of illustration it serves quite nicely and is great for pushing the bounds of artistic expression; anything more than this would just be plain bad HDR. Flickr is chock full of this bad HDR.
The next image is far better, also taken done in photomatix but it gives a far more realistic impression of what I saw and in my humble opinion, realism is what we’re after. It manages to convey a feeling of warmth coming from the lit interior of the house and show that it is early evening; The colours are not cartoony and there are no awful auras; the colours remain vibrant and very close to what my eyes saw at the time.
But each to his or her own so I’ll leave you to decide which you like best.
ps. if you’re wondering about the long brown stripe the length of the garden, we ran new water mains to the house; killed my poor lawn.
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