Posted February 16th, 2009

After the Snows

Another major dump of snow and it really is getting hard to get around out there! After the snow it was back to deep cold ... but February cold is not so bad as the intensifying sun radiates some precious warmth. Ah yes, the SUN!!! It seems like an eternity since we last saw a few days in a row of sunny skies and it has been glorious. This image is another HDR composite of 5 exposures made at 1.5 stop intervals. I could not satisfactorily merge them in Photoshop ... the sky came out a mess with colour banding, a problem I have experienced before with Photoshop’s HDR ... but Photomatix did a fine job. I’m just using the trial version of Photomatix so it was back into Photoshop for tone mapping and touch-ups. Lots of touch-ups! The ultra wide Sigma zoom maintains good contrast when aimed towards the sun but it produces a lot of coloured flare artifacts. Cleaning up these artifacts as best I could was more work than the image surely is worth ... I guess that is the cost of my dedication to presenting current work here.
Pentax K10D, Sigma AF 10-20mm f/4.0-5.6 EX DC @ 10mm, f/9.5