Photo in Flickr’s Explore

Yesterday the Letting of steam photo got into the Flickr’s Explore selection. This is my second photo that made it there :). The highest position it had until now was 383 :)

Single RAW HDR

Most HDR’s are created from multiple shots, but from time to time, you have to use just a single RAW file. This is usually with a moving subject, or something like fireworks. Photomatix can directly open just a single RAW file and tonnemap it, but I prefer a different approach. What I do is that I export the image three times from Lightroom, always with a different exposure setting. Then I have my three photos, from where I continue as with a normal HDR file. From my experience, this gives me a better result, than if I only opened the RAW directly in Photomatix.

Btw. If you have a JPG file, you can still try HDR processing it. Just export it at different exposures and combine back in Photomatix. The results are worse than if you used a RAW file, but sometimes are really nice. Some of my older photos are created from a single JPG, because I wanted to edit photos I took before I started with HDR.

Just to see the difference, here is the original RAW file for today’s photo.

Reflected Fireworks

I really hopped I’ll be able to take new fireworks shots over the Kuchajda lake this year. But this year, there were none. I don’t know why as it’s kind of a tradition, but either way, it was raining so heavily that day, that it would be quite impossible to take any good shots. So this is one of the last years shots, when the weather was great and the fireworks were just beautiful :)

HDR from a single shot, taken with Canon 450D with Sigma 10-20mm lens, from a tripod.