Trip Favourite

The “Grand Photo Tour” was a great trip and it certainly produced some memorable images. In the course of our travels, Howie and I visited four U.S. National Parks, a National Monument and a Navajo Tribal Park, all in four days. I’ve shared a number of my photos from the trip in the last eight blog posts and in so doing I’ve now exhausted the inventory of pictures I wanted to publish.  Today, I went back over all the pictures in search of a favourite. The one I’ve chosen is similar to one I posted earlier in the blog entitled “Monument Valley”. The picture is one of the Totem Pole and Yei Bi Chei Monuments, a series of spires we photographed just after sunrise.

This picture has a greater range of luminance between its lightest and darkest areas than is achievable using standard digital imaging techniques or photographic methods. High dynamic range pictures (HDR) such as this more accurately represent the range of intensity levels found in real scenes, ranging from direct sunlight to faint starlight. High dynamic range pictures better capture what the eye can see, more than a camera alone can accomplish in a single picture. I took three pictures, identical except for the exposure. One was a correctly exposed shot, one was over-exposed and a third was under-exposed.  I then used software designed to stack and blend the three exposures to bring out the wider range of luminance available in the three images.

I finished the picture using Photoshop to tweak the colour saturation and do some selective sharpening.

Voila my favourite from our trip.