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I arrived in the magnificent Yosemite valley the afternoon before earth day and first day of National Parks week. It was stunning to see how busy the valley was compared to a month ago. Due to very little snow this winter, Glacier Point opened up the day before my visit so I decided to head up before sunset and take advantage of the clear sky for some star trails and astro photography. After sunset, I setup to photograph a star trails image over Yosemite Valley. I’m uber excited with the results. The swirling star trails help capture the grand and mystic feeling when experiencing the purity of the cool air stinging your lungs while standing above the mighty Yosemite Valley on a clear spring night.

It turns out, (Sheldon Neill and Colin Delehanty) the time-lapse ninjas behind the incredibly awesome Yosemite HD video were also out to start their planned follow up video. Check out their behind the scenes post from last weekend – (The Start of Yosemite HD II). I was extremely impressed with their dedication as they photographed all night and were still shooting when I returned for earth day sunrise the following morning!!

Star Trails Field Notes

For those interested, here are my star trails notes that have worked great for me:

• Set white balance to daylight
• Set focus to infinity
• Use lowest f-stop possible
• Set Image preview off
• Set long exposure noise reduction off
• Take ISO 1600 – 6400 to frame / test
• Use ISO 400 – 800 depending on ambient light
• Use jpeg instead of RAW
• Use remote shutter release and button lock on remote
• Set Continuous mode
• Manual mode, 30 sec exposure
• Capture time (need 1 hour, 120 shots)
• To process, I use this Photoshop script

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I’ve been a huge fan of HDR since discovering it 3-4 years ago. When done well, I feel HDRs help capture the spirit of both the photographer and scene photographed in ways just not possible due to the limited technical capabilities of even the latest and greatest pro DSLR cameras which often cannot capture the full dynamic range of a beautiful and/or interesting high contrast scene.

The key to HDR photography is ‘doing them well’ as when HDR is overcooked, it typically takes away from the photographers artistic intentions. I’ll be first to admit that I’ve ‘abused’ the HDR sliders as is the case with much of my early HDR work. I think most fall victim of doing the same when just starting out with HDR photography. It is much more challenging yet rewarding to use subtle adjustments; however, even then I continue to find the HDR programs provide too many unintended results.

Here is a quick high level example of my HDR workflow and tools used which have been mostly the same since I started processing HDR photos:

1. Take a bracketed series of images
2. Import the RAW images into Lightroom
3. Create HDR composite with Photomatix, Nik HDR Efex Pro or native HDR in Photoshop
4. Open the original bracketed images along with the HDR composite as layers in Photoshop
5. Manual blend
6. Apply some basic exposure tweaks of the blended image
7. Apply some creative filters and blend with layer masks
8. Export and share

Over the past 18 months, I’ve been on the hunt to reduce the ‘cartoon’ look in my HDRs and drive towards a more realistic feeling by using HDR as a tool to capture the full dynamic range in a scene without making the final image into some funky fake looking result. Too many of my HDR images looked pretty good from a distance on a computer screen but I have been underwhelmed with the results when printing in large format or displaying on a large 24″+ monitor. This led me to add Lee Filter Holder system into my toolkit with various ND and gradient filters. I thought maybe I could use the filters to help narrow the dynamic range so my HDR blending would be a little less intensive thus reducing some cleaner and more realistic results.

The filters helped but I was still getting some wacky results and artifacts from HDR programs such as Photomatix even when using subtle slider adjustments. I’d often end up spending 1-2hrs on a image manually blending the HDR composite with layer masks of the original images in Photoshop but even then the results were still coming out much like they were before using the Lee Filters. Then I discovered the brilliant and simple iHDR process shared by Jay Patel and Varina Patel.

I’ve been experimenting with the iHDR process over the past week and I’m simply blown away. I’m finally achieving the end results in my images that I’ve been seeking for months!! All the old HDR blending programs such as Photomatix are dead to me now… I can’t wait to continue going back through my favorite images and reprocessing. If you are into HDR photography and haven’t yet, check out Jay and Varina Patel’s work and iHDR technique!!

Here is a quick side by side example of the startling difference in results from a recent image I took of the Golden Gate Bridge on St Patrick’s day:

iHDR vs Photomatix HDR

Example 1 – “The Golden Gate“, San Francisco, California

iHDR vs Photomatix HDR – 100% Crop

Example 2 – “Heart of Yosemite”, Yosemite National Park, California

iHDR vs Photomatix HDR – 100% Crop

Example 3 -“Last Exit”, Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, Michigan

iHDR vs Photomatix HDR – 100% Crop

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Photo Details

Canon 5D Mark II
Canon TS-E24mm
9 Image panorama @ f16
LEE soft ND grad (100x150mm) 0.3
Lee foundation kit filter holder with Lee 82mm adapter ring
ISO 100
Pano file processed with PTGui
RAW file processed with Lightroom 4.1
TIFF file processed with Photoshop CS5

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