Project365 - Red Sky in Morning

Introduction

While I like learning new techniques, I am also learning to apply techniques I have learned in new and different ways. This helps me grow my "creative" side. So this morning, I was driving south to meet my friend for coffees. Along the way I spied this church which was lit up & backlit by the sunrise. While I liked the colours, I knew that I would struggle with the low light. High dynamic range to the rescue !

The Setup
Nothing especially difficult here - my Canon 60D with the Canon 24-105mm f/4 L lens, all riding atop the Manfrotto tripod for stability. I set up the bracketing function, to capture +/- 1.3 stops. This will give me the dark, medium & light frames required. The scene was still, and the shutter speed was slow (about 1.5 seconds), so no need for setting up the AI-Servo to take three pictures at a time.
The Photos

The "darker" photo, at -1.3 EV

The "medium" photo, at 0EV

The "lighter" photo, at +1.3 EV











Now you'd think why bother with the under and over exposed photos. Isn't the "normal" (0EV) picture going to look the same ? In fact, it does not. I must confess I did post-process the final image slightly, but merely to crop the image. Here is the final product:

Lessons Learned
As you can see, the blues & pinks in the sky are much more vibrant. So while HDR didn't do much for capturing highlights & lowlights - it is often used in scenes where there is lots of shadow - it certainly helped capture the brilliant hues in the early morning sky. Further, the accent lighting on the building seems to "pop" more, adding a bit of drama to the photograph.
All in, I think that was an excellent way to use the technique to capture the photo I wanted. I am pleased with the end-result.

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