HDR, Take 5

Take 4 sucked, so I’m skipping it.  I’m convinced now after 5 attempts that I have no idea what I’m doing.  I’m learning through a combination of trial and error, mostly error.

Here you can see my 5th attempt at HDR.  The lawn in my apartment complex, near sunset.  With the wind moving the leaves, they will seem a little blurry.  This is exactly what you’re supposed to avoid in an HDR photo, but I was aiming at getting 5 shots to combine instead of my typical 2-3 shots.

Here is the +/- 0 exposure shot (1/25 sec, ISO-100, f/4.5, 44mm focal length), in other words, the “original shot” on which everything else was either over- or under-exposed.

Here you can see that the leaves seem a little more substantial, and the photo is a darker green.  Unlike the HDR photo, the hot-spots of light on the grass and pavement are blown highlights.  In the HDR, they are mostly blown, but you still get some green.

If I take a fragment of the entire frame from the the section of the composition with the stairs (see below)

(see the black frame), you’ll notice some unpleasant tone mapping distortion in the fragment (50% crop) below..

And here (below) is the same photo again with the undistorted sections diminished

If you look carefully at the two circular sections that are brighter than the rest of the fragment, you’ll see where the tone mapping failed because it interpreted the blown highlight as blue (this makes sense when you think about it, because “the sky is blue” and therefore the sky in the background (lower distortion) where the highlights are would be blue.) The other is a tone map distortion (upper distortion) is the result of “ghosting” due to movement of the leaves in the foreground.

As someone (Thomas H Palmer?) said “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”