I was one of those photographers who carried two GND filters, a one stop and a two stop. A year or two ago I removed them from the bag and started bracketing certain scenes for HDR images, even though I did not own any HDR software nor did I know what the technology would evolve into. I also did know how well it would be acceptable by myself or others. The only cost to shooting more images would be a small amount of my time and disc space. So, why not.

Just as any software there is a learning curve involved. We all go through the steps. I mumble to myself a question like: What happens when I do this? I watch the image form on the screen then mutter something close to “Yuko!” I then quickly hit command “Z” and try something else. I’m quickly noticing how important it is to expose them correctly. A good series of images will make a good final image.

The scene above was taken while visiting my parents in January of 2010. I took a total of seven images, bracketed at one stop each. This scene is created with three exposures, one at metered, the second at plus one stop and the third at minus one stop, and using one of the presets in Nik HDR Efex. I settled on the Nik HDR Effex software over Photomatix because it was more intuitive for me. Only time will tell if I made a sound decision.