Lat weekend, we went to a reconstruction of battle for the fort at Srebrna Gora. It was featuring a Napoleon war episode in the war, and turned out to be a really international event. The soldiers, dressed in the appropriate to the era attire were not only Polish enthusiasts of the “living history”, but there were units from Germany and Czech Republic as well. It was great fun, and we certainly know for next time where to position ourselves for the best pictures of the battle itself (we were in less then optimal location this time). But luckily, we came early that day, and saw and photographed a lot of preparations for the battle, and took a look at the military camp where everybody resided.

I talked my husband into a detour last week, when we drove between my parents and my grandma place. I remembered the point (close to small village of Jaworznik) with an exquisite view. It was a reasonably good day for stopping there, with not too much humidity and even a lurking sun. Not many days like it around here. And it is not even England! Anyway, I was surprised to see how the spot changed in last few years. It used to be a wild parking next to some church ruin (photos coming sometimes later, as it was occupied by a weeding photo shoot). Now, there is parking, benches, viewing area, all tourist-ready. Interesting.
Back to the subject- we stood there, and after few tries decided to shoot an HDR (sun, lots of contrast, no planning shoot so all the filters were at home, taking the camera was last minute thought). So we set the camera to all manual, f/16 for nice depth of field, and got three horizontal images, 7 different exposures for each.
For HDR merging, I just picked the extreme underexposed, extreme overexposed and the proper middle. They were 3 stops apart to each other. I prepared those HDRs in CS5, making adjustments on the first image, saving them as preset and then just applying to remaining images. I felt so smart…
Until I merged them all into pano, also in CS5. Well?

The right image is clearly different then the rest! I was trying to fix it in Lightroom using the grad filter, without much success. I was considering merging to panorama first, before working the HDR, but realized quickly enough that it wouldn’t solve my problem at all. Clearly, same settings applied to images differently related to the early afternoon sun was not an option. Especially, when this sun is lighting your scene on the side. So I reprocessed all three HDRs, using saved preset just as starting point to achive more consisntency between them before merging.
And just for fun, if you are scanning the details in the view, try finding the hidden garbage. To my surprise, I found it only while post-processing already ready panorama! Write in the comment, where and what it is.

This old wall, or entrance, is a part of the same palace I showed on Monday. After finishing off photographing the whole ruin, I went off to focus on details, on windows framing the tress growing from the inside of the palace and tress coming through doors.

I was astonished when I saw it for the first time several weeks ago, when we arrived to Poland. In my husband’s region, there are fields and fields of canola. And right about now, they are all blooming. So between green wheat, you can see those large, bright yellow areas. Quite picturesque.

I am spending this weekend in one of Polish lake regions. In South-Western part of Poland, there is locally popular but not widely known Slawa Lake, around which there is a number of smaller lake, creating very pleasant vacation area. We went for a ride yesterday in the evening. We were looking for a access spots to the lake and interesting views. The low hanging, dark clouds also added to this particular landscape. I used HDR to retain detail in those clouds, and at the same make all the trees well visible.

My parents place is full of stuff. Just general stuff, old objects, decorative items, flowers, you name it. It is a photographic paradise compared to my ascetic house. This old balance is their attic finding. My father renovated it, painted, and now it is perfectly positioned in the window for an easy photograph. The detail in the balance just asked for an HDR image, and then I wanted to check out my freshly downloaded CS5 trial. It worked just fine.

My last trip to Arches a bit more then a month ago was the least lucky one. We were traveling through Utah trying to escape the weather to be able to visit places, and ended up in Moab at the beginning of the rainy streak. We decided to go to Arches National Park despite the rain, and we were rewarded the hike in the most Northern section of the park. It was the only place in the region that day where it was not raining!

I haven’t seen petrified forest before. Well, technically I have not seen it last time in Utah, either. Just this year, Southern Utah received well above average of snow, and I happened to be there middle March, a day or two after last snow storm. Escalante Petrified Forest State Park was basically closed, and all I could see was a representative display at the visitors parking. Not much, but gave me some ideas what petrified forest is about. And several nice photograhs, which I thought my need some Details Enhancement. And believe it or not, it was done without use of Photomatix. Just smart Lightroom Details Enhancer preset (sorry, I cannot find the source of the preset right now. If you are the creator, put the link in Comments, I will be happy to add it to the post).

It seems to me that HDR was invented with indoor shoots in mind. Nowhere else it can improve photographs in two ways, not just one. It not only gives incredible detail in the interior, main part of the shoot, but also lets you pick out of the windows what is outside . In the image below, you can see through the glass door the deck, covered with blue tent and some sitting spots. At the same time, you can study all the objects on the fireplace. Nice.

I was thinking hard what to do special on the blog for the post 500. And it almost seems like yesterday, that there was a post 400 . Anyway, I figured another way to get the readers of this blog to interact, if they wish to See below.
This image is a bit special. I have not spend so much time on a blog image in a while. I love this image. But straight from the camera, it just was so flat. It was not what I saw on the scene. I remember the light on the organs, the detail in the ceiling, and spacious room. At the least the last thing was properly rendered in the photo, due to my favorite fisheye lens. For the detail I needed help of single-exposure HDR and processing in Photomatix. To reduce the red-color cast which is a weak-point of all HDRs, I moved just about every color-related slider in Lightroom. Then I went to help my husband in the garage for few minutes, and I liked what was on the screen when I came back . I am sure I didn’t like it before I went. Anyway, I decided to leave it that way.
But you may not agree with my vision of this image. If you would like to see how you can process it better/different, please download the dng file here, use your software of choice, and upload the finished image to the Flickr group pool I just created.