Had a few minutes to shoot a couple of sets of brackets (two actually) while on my way back to the house this morning, and I made them both count. My eldest daughter, who was with at the time, was very patient, but I did not want to press my luck! Anyway, this is the result of the first set of brackets, and following suggestion from Twitter pal @BeachSidePaul, you’ll see this one today, and the product of the second set tomorrow. Thanks, Paul, for helping me choose which one to process and post first.
So on to what I was thinking with this shot. When I shot this scene, I had not actually been thinking of the song to which I ended up processing. I had actually thought I’d process to David Bowie’s ‘Putting out Fire’, which is one of my all time favorite songs! But, alas, I wasn’t “feeling” it when I started running the brackets through HDR Soft’s Photomatix Pro. And then it came to me, Natalie Merchant’s ‘This House is on Fire’ (I’m a HUGE Natalie Merchant fan, btw)! Worked out like a charm! For those interested, I shot this with the trusty Nikon D700 coupled to the Nikkor 14-24 f/2.8. As many of you know, I am a more is better kind of guy so I used 9 brackets for this piece, each 1ev apart. In post process, I used the aforementioned Photomatix Pro to tone map the brackets, and I used Nik Software’s awesome Color Efex Pro 3.0 for the rest.
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