Morning Light

My first morning in Montana, I saw the most epic window ever. It was early in the morning, right after sunrise. The window was on the east side of the house, so it caught the full morning glow. What really made it special though, was the curtains. They were, I guess are, an orange cream color, that when lit by the early sun just glowed gold. They ever bounced light back onto the wall around it, so it literally looks like the window is glowing. 

Ever since that morning, I've told myself I should take a photo of the window. However, the light is only right early in the morning....and you can guess what that means. Too busy sleeping or eating food. 

But this morning, I finally got the motivation to take the dang picture! 

To quickly frame the picture, I just went handheld. I sometimes will do quick test shots like this if I'm not sure if I want to take the photo or not yet. It looked pretty good in the view finder, so I ran back to my room and grabbed my tripod. 

Exposure on this one was going to be difficult. There was a greater dynamic range than my camera could capture, that is without doing a lot of post on it. It could be done, but the full range of colors and tones wouldn't really be accurately captured. There would be noise issues as well. 

So I did a bracketed sequence to capture all the information I could. To figure out what my base exposure was going to be, I first set my aperture. My lens isn't very sharp wide open, so I selected f/6.3. Next, I set my shutter to one stop above the slowest I can shoot handheld. This would give me the brightest image I could, while still getting a sharp image when I shot at EV+1. EV+1 would slow the shutter one stop, putting it at the slowest speed I can handhold. This is about 1/20 at 40mm. Finally, I bumped up my ISO to 400 to get a proper exposure. Not overblowing the highlights, but not losing too much shadows. No, it didn't capture all the detail I wanted, but that's what the EV-1 and EV+1 would give me. Set the camera to 2 sec delay, and the shots fired off for me. 

You may be questioning at this point why I was concerning myself with shooting handheld when I was on a tripod. The answer, morning happened. What is this thing called a tripod anyway?

I did a little more editing than I usually do for this, and I think it'll be easier to explain with a video than to write it all out. 

But first, I'll show you the two edits done with Photomatix, and with just Lr from one exposure. Just so you can see how you'd do those versions of HDR. 

Photomatix:

Lr:

Ps: 

See you tomorrow!