SteelStacks in HDR

It’s been a bit of a slog getting back into photography. Picking up the camera again has been difficult, tedious and ultimately rewarding. This morning I took a drive down to Bethlehem and stopped at SteelStacks to get a few shots to ‘reboot’ my creativity. I ended up staying for an hour or so taking hundreds of pictures walking on the catwalks.

This SteelStacks shot was taken on my Sony A7Rii set for aperture priority (f/3.5) and was merged from 5 bracketed exposures (-2, -1, 0, +1, +2 ev). I initially imported the images into On1 Photo Raw, did some tweaking of the RAW images and exported them as TIFF images into AuroraHDR 2018 for HDR processing. Both of these tools are simply amazing in their power and simplicity.

Once I had the HDR nailed down, I saved the image and imported it into On1 for further processing. I needed to remove some color fringing that occurred in the HDR processing (“Stuff” happens). I also added a polarizing filter to the sky area, tweaked some of the color temperature in a few areas around the SteelStacks, and added a subtle vignette to the image.

I’ve decided to bite the bullet and ditch Lightroom in favor of On1 Photo Raw for my image cataloging and management. This is something I will be posting about when I get some time – including a few gotchas that tripped me up 🙁