experimenting hdr

[abiom]

Hi guys! your comment and critics pls..I shot 3 frames with 1 stop difference. Used Photomattix, then little touch up in Lightroom.

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[Kevin Childress]

The composition is still appealing to me. And now I can clearly see the boardwalk is painted pink! 

Usually, only a couple stops won't provide a smooth gradient between the dark shadows and the brightest highlights. But as it appears here, only a couple of stops works pretty well. You have applied the tonemapping very judiciously and that is a really good way to begin your HDR photography. But I will say this: If you only used 3 exposures with 1.0 stop variance, a well-adjusted raw file from your D7000 will easily give you the dynamic range needed to cover that same range in a single exposure. 

The biggest problem I have with Photomatix is the way it handles colors. If you're not careful, Photomatix will over-saturate your colors very quickly. I don't know if you increased saturation in Photomatix or in Lightroom, but either way your greens (trees), oranges and yellows (sky), and the reds (center of frame, behind the trees) are way over-saturated. The bluest part of the sky across the top of the frame is getting very close to that point also. 

A couple recommendations for the in-camera work with HDR photography: 

Your EXIF data shows auto white balance. I suggest that you do not use auto white balance when capturing multiple exposures in HDR photography. The slightest change in light quality can shift auto white balance and cause you real problems in post processing. Go ahead and set your camera to a manual white balance. A daylight setting would have given you a cool temperature similar to what you have here, while a cloudy setting would have warmed the image up a bit. Either way, you'll have a more consistent outcome with manual white balance. 

How do you control the lens focus between your bracketed frames? This is another area you want to control tightly for HDR photography. You can use auto focus to set the focus initially. But once you have focus locked, set the camera/lens to manual focus to prevent the camera from attempting to refocus across the bracket. 

How are you releasing the shutter to capture your bracket? A remote shutter release is a key tool for high quality HDR photography. I use this one and it works wonderfully!

A final word about experimenting with HDR photography. Have you ever seen the "Stages of a Photographer" timeline? Here is a link to it ... pay particular attention to the green line!  :)

[abiom]

I've read your comments and tips over and over again. Many thanks and really appreciate it

[Kevin Childress]

Glad to help. The reason I asked the questions about focusing during the bracket and releasing the shutter is because there are places in this image that seem a bit out of focus. I thought maybe we could troubleshoot the problem with this image so that you could improve the image quality the next time around.