This photo was taken near Holden, Utah. The clouds on the Eastern side of I-15 looked pretty cool so I pulled off the freeway and headed down a muddy dirt road (in our mini van). I quickly got out of the van to take a five exposure two frame photo. I had to do this one fast before my young child got out of the van to play in the mud. I love how the light from the setting sun highlights the clouds.

Thank you for visiting.

~wr~

We were traveling along I-15 in Utah just as a late winter storm was breaking up. I knew there would be possibilities for a nice sunset. I also knew that my young kids would not want to stop for long. As we came up to one of the last turnoffs near Beaver, Utah the clouds had a wild look to them. I also knew that we had to move quickly to our final destination. I grabbed my D300 and 24-70 lens. I set it to iso 200 at 24 mm at f/13. I then set the camera to take five different exposures and fired away. I took four different sections of the valley as the sun was just over the mountains. I jumped back into the car before the baby even noticed I was gone. Although I don’t advise you to shoot this type of photo hand held, I didn’t have the time to set the tripod up. I used Lightroom 3 beta, CS4, and Topaz Adjust to put the final edits on this photo.

Thank you for visiting.

~wr~

This is one more view from the other night at Utah Lake. For this photo I would like to share the steps I took to bring this photo to the finalized product.

First I started out by transporting the 5 raw images into Photomatix Pro. I made a few adjustments and then saved the results. I then imported the original Raw Photos into Lightroom 3 beta and processed them again. I added elements of sharpening, contrast, saturation, and I added an increase of a half stop. At this point I ran the sync so that all photos had the same edits, and then exported this batch to Photomatix Pro and re-ran another HDR. Both of the images had good and bad. In the second batch the noise in the sky was dramatically increased. The rocks had much more detail and color. I took both photos into CS4. I wanted the sky and reflection from the first with the rocks of the second. Once I had taken the dark rocks out of the photo one more problem was present. On the edges of the rocks and ice where the bright orange and yellow touched there was a bright red line. At this point I again used CS4 and painted the color of the water where this line was present.

I like the dark background with the bright yellows and oranges. It offers a nice contrast to the foreground.
I like the texture of the rocks.
I like the color of the rocks and how bright they are.
I like the small patch of ice it brings interest into the photo and breaks the color of the reflection and rocks.

Let me know what you think, and thank you for visiting my site.

~wr~

Tonight the clouds and the setting sun were working together to set up for a spectacular display of color. This didn’t quite happen. Right where the sun set there was a thick layer of clouds. However, with the use of HDR I was able to pull the colors out of the sky and this is the result. The “snow” in the bottom left of the photo is the remnants of the ice sheet that had covered Utah Lake for several months. During a recent storm the ice was blown into small ice mountains. This is what is left after a recent warm up.



You may remember this photo from December. This photo was taken from the same spot as the one above.
For the photo above I can’t remember a time where this large body of water was as calm and smooth as it was tonight. The only movement on the water was from my kids throwing rocks into the water. The above photo is a five exposure HDR shot at 24 mm and 200 iso.

Thank you for visiting my site today.

~wr~

Today was a crazy day. I had a friend who purchased some new equipment and he invited me to go on a photoshoot. Just as I was to leave work I had an issue that came up that needed attention. By the time I worked through the issues I was too tired to go on the photoshoot. Instead I came home and spent some time relaxing. As luck would have it with in a few minutes my wife was commenting on how perfect the sunset was. So tonight I decided to return to an old set of photos and look at sunsets. This was one I have posted before but at a different angle. This is again a seven exposure HDR.

Thank you for visiting today.

~wr~

Today I decided to face reality, we are still in winter’s grasp. This is a photo that I took a few weeks back of the mouth of the Provo Canyon just as the sun was setting. This is a two frame seven exposure panoramic. I used Topaz adjust to bring out a little more color.

Thank you for visiting.

~wr~

Click on the photo if you would like to see this photo large and on black.