The other day I went out to catch the sunrise at a lovely beach I’d recently discovered. It’s along the Awhitu regional park, a wetlands restoration project bordering on the Manakau harbour. Here’s a shot taken just a couple of minutes before sunrise, when the colours are at their most intense.

Sunrise at Kauritutahi Island - Click for full size

The small island you can see on the right is Kauritutahi island. I felt a bit sorry for this island as it’s only an island at high tide..

Autobracketing : my camera, as with most Canons, only takes 3 autobracketed shots. But you can specify the exposure in 1/2 or 1/3 stops. So you can have -2, 0 and +2. Or -1.5, 0 +1.5. The maximum range is +-2 stops. And for nearly every conceivable shot this is sufficient, even a shot looking directly into the sun, with shady shadows, you can capture the whole scene OK. Sometimes you need to apply some exposure compensation.

Nikon users (I learnt from Trey) can only autobracket in 1-stop intervals. But their cameras can autobracket 5 or more shots.

Now it amuses me greatly when I read on some sites that some picture has been created from “9 autobracketed images”. Why? “Because they can” is the only real reply I think. Even -2,0,+2 is a bit much for many uses..

Often the image that accompanies such a shot does not contain any more dynamic range that can be captured with a single shot!

Anyway, in the spirit of “overdoing things just because you can” I present a *triple* tone mapped image!

Trees in Awhitu Regional Park - click for full size

It’s possible with Photomatix to re-tonemap and image after the initial tone mapping. This can give you nice results with a more even histogram. But it also often gives more noise and freaky colours. It’s easy to do; after you have created your HDR image and tone mapped it the first time (ie after the final image comes up when you click “Process”), you press Control-T, or do Process >> Tone Mapping from the main menu.

The shot above I took one step further and tone mapped three times. I could get away with this on the particular image as the colours were subdued to start with, and I felt that they needed some punch.

HDR Spotting Codes

I have some HDR spotting invite codes if anyone is interested. Drop me an email to bob at beausoft dot com with a link to your flickr page or other portfolio. I need to check out your work before inviting.

New Camera

Well not really. Or not yet. But I really have my eye on a Canon EOS 7D. If you can help me reach my goal here in any way I’d really appreciate it.. It’s such a great camera, and will no doubt improve the pics on this site. Ideally you’d send me money, but there are easier ways that don’t cost you anything..

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