This is a story about screwing up. Back in October, I was rushing to put a bunch of stuff on ebay before my monthly poker night. I had a brain wave, it said to me... "Reset your camera for 3 megapixels and shoot these in low resolution to save time having to compress them and save for web to put on the ebay listings." I said to myself "Great idea, and I changed the settings on the camera."I go off to Poker night, and all of a sudden, there is a double rainbow over my friends house, with the most spectacular red sky bringing in the storms... My camera was in the car, cause I never leave home without it, so I grabbed it and fired off about 50 or 60 shots of the miraculous happenings in the sky. My hubby called me on my cell phone, and said, "Are you shooting this sky? Well, of course I am!" I replied.
After poker, got home and downloaded the shots. I thought, wow, these pictures are really crappy, what in the world happened here.... then a big brick hit me on my pea brain, and said... You shot the best sky of the year in 3 megapixels you idiot. I have been so PO'd at myself for doing this, I waited until now to sit down and try to salvage these shots.
So here is my little tutorial.... HDR can sometimes be used to TONE DOWN a shot, not just put it over the top!
Check out these exposures. Aperture setting... Automatic exposure bracketing set at Minus 2... 0.... and Plus 2.
The sky is so red it doesn't even look real... but these are how they came straight out of the camera.
I went ahead and generated a HDR out of these three shots on Photomatix Pro. I DEsaturated the color 55% while tone mapping to get the sky toned down. At least now I also have a little foreground in the HDR exposure.
So two lessons learned here...
Always take a second to check your settings on your camera before you start to shoot....
And sometimes HDR can be used to tone down a photo instead of pumping it up!
PS You don't have to critique the photos, I know they stink.
