Photo Details
| Title: | Forest Sunset I, Dochfour, Inverness, Scotland. |
| Taken: | 24 May, 2012 |
| Location: | |
| Camera: | Canon EOS 5D Mark II |
| Focal length: | 32mm |
| Shutter speed: | 1/6s |
| Aperture: | ƒ/16 |
| ISO: | 100 |
On our visit to Scotland in 2012, we made a stop by the Dochfour estate near Inverness to take a look around. The weather was sunny with bright blue skies, something that I think is pretty unusual for Scotland. I’m sure the locals were loving it, but I did wish for a few clouds to help add some drama to my photos. The sunsets were also harsh and a bit hazy, so I needed to get a little creative. Finding this wonderful forest was just the ticket, and it gave me a great way to put some pop in my photos.
This is a 7-shot HDR, back when I did HDRs with 7 shots for some reason. Whatever I did, it worked. The blending between the dark foreground and bright background is perfect, and there’s no sign of that nasty HDR look that gave the technique a bad name. The sunlight flows over the flowers and breaths life into their petals, and the terrain seems inviting and mysterious at the same time.
I like this photo, and it reminds me of what I could do with HDR in situations with a lot of dynamic range like this. Even today with the amazing dynamic range on modern Nikons, I don’t think I could recreate this photo without some kind of HDR or luminosity masking. Seeing this again is good encouragement to dust off some old techniques I haven’t used in a while and try them again.
(This photo is one of two from the same forest. I’ve posted both in the past, but I’ll repost the second one to the blog sometime in the future.)
