A wooden hut, in the forest of Müden am Örtze (Lower Saxony, Germany). A handheld HDR photo I shot on a recent holiday trip we took.
iPhone version of the same photo (almost)
I had arrived the evening before and liked how the sun set between the trees and over the house but I didn’t have my camera with me. I shot it with my iPhone, I liked it and was wondering if I could make it better with a real camera. Here is the iPhone version that I posted on my mobile photo Flickr feed.
I particularly liked how I managed to get those two horses almost posing in perfect harmony. The small black pony and the white horse are even more interesting than the house. But despite all I tried, the horses weren’t interested in doing that pose again. So I just waited for them to leave.
Sunset in the Forest, click for high res HDR image
Here is the HDR version I shot with the real camera.
As I was shooting it handheld I had to bump up the ISO to 1600, I could have avoided that if I had opened the aperture to 4.0 which is the best my lens can do, but if I had done that the sun would have totally over-exposed so I had to close the aperture to 16 and I lost on the iso.
I then worked the three images in Lightroom, then Photoshop HDR, then Topaz and back to Lightroom. I’m not very familiar with Photoshop HDR, plus I haven’t been doing much photography so it took a bit of time.
My biggest hurdle with Photoshop HDR was to not get the “HDR look” and try to keep natural. I had to manually unsaturate it a lot, plus quite some tweaks.
I hope you like it.
About Müden: We went to visit the Berlin Air Lift museum in Fassberg which is quite interesting, if you’re interested in Berlin’s history – how the food, coal and supplies of an entire city of 2m people was managed by airfreight for an entire year. Then while you’re over there and have a camera go visit Celle, the city is quite impressive with almost 500 half-timber houses still standing in use. A castle and plenty of other great stuff to shoot. I didn’t have my camera and was only there during the afternoon so not much to shoot.
