Didn’t get out last Wednesday (the weather was pretty awful) and the previous week’s exploration yielded little in the way of images but I did continue my weekly attempt to photograph something new – in this case the Sudbury River in Sudbury (not far off of Route 27). Nothing special here, especially considering what I could have done yesterday with the wonderful fog we had — but unfortunately the business of having a business prevented me from getting anywhere near a camera until long after the sun burned off all of the good stuff… Sigh.
Anyways, in a rush to get out of the house I forgot to bring my graduated neutral density filters (and my hat) so when this scene began to present itself I had to go to “plan B”. Consequently these first two images are HDR composites from 3 separate exposures. I wasn’t sure if I liked the B&W version better so I posted both here. Other than the HDR, which manages to keep the dark ice and the brilliant rising sun all within the exposure range, little was done to the image beyond the usual tonal tweaking.
I’m not what you’d call an expert with the HDR tools, but I’m still trying to figure out if the halo around the trees is an optical illusion or a processing artifact. When I zoom into the image in Lightroom, I don’t see the halo… Something to ponder on a rainy day…
A rising sun doesn’t give you much time to find good photographs. The image below is the first of a few exposures I made trying to capture the warm glow of the sun rising on the ice. Unfortunately by the time I managed to get a better composition lined up the sun was too bright and lacks the warmth and evenness that this, admittedly uninspiring, version does — but it’s always a challenge to race the sun.
