Hopping in a Wheat Field

Nick, Alex and I went out to catch the sunset hitting the mountains tonight. I was out on 19th and saw the sun coming through the clouds, hitting the Bridgers. It was near golden hour, so the mountains were bathed in the most beautiful purple gold light. 

But of course, once I got Alex and Nick and got back to the view point, the clouds came in and....no more light on the mountains... sad face... 

After HDR processing four times, then compositing the HDR in Ps, this is what I came up with. 

It's ok, but not great. So we moved on.

There was still some sun left, so we drove out to some random hay field overlooking Bozeman. I hoped to get some better shots from up there of the sunset, but of course the sun went down before we go there...

Really out of luck now.

But Alex had forgotten his SD card, which ended up being a great thing. Because he started hopping through the hay field right in front of me. 

I set the camera to f3.5, 1/10, ISO250 and drive mode.  f3.5 to get enough light to shoot at f10, 1/10 to blur Alex a bunch, and ISO250 to get it bright enough.

Drive mode to catch as many frames of him as possible. 

First thing I did in Lr was export all the frames to Photomatix Pro. Why did I do this? To make a background of course! Apparently, when you export a lot of the same scene, it actually serves to improve the overall tonal range of the photo. Don't know why, but the HDR looks awesome.

Next, I composited the frames in Ps with the darken blending mode, which essentially made a sequential image out of everything. So all the hopping Alex's in the same frame.

Finally, the two frames went together in Ps, with the hopping Alex frame on top with the blending mode of pin light. Why pin light? Because it worked. Don't know what it does, but it did exactly what I wanted. 

Didn't do anything in Lr. 

It's amazing how Photomatix can make such an awesome background just by compositing all the frames. Wonderful contrast, rich tones, perfectly exposed....just wonderful. And then the darken blend mode put Alex in perfectly, and so easily. 

See you tomorrow!