Ferny Forest ... In Camera HDRs

Under the canopy at Coombe Wood near Croydon, a favourite spot for me, but usually challenging in sunny weather due to the wide dynamic range caused by the deep shadows of the forest floor contrasted with the brightness of sky peeking through.

I took a tripod and decided to use the in-camera HDR processing, set to medium. A little tweaking in software gave me results that seem to represent the scenes fairly well. I didn't see any way to do so with any single exposure .....

K7 and Samyang 14mm 1:2.8 ED IF UMC, at f 13 ......



1)







2)







3)







4)







5) K7 and SMC A250m 1:1.7, at f2.5

And they turned out very well too,

These are very nice, Nigel. Just the right subtle use of the dreaded HDR to hold those shadow and highlight details, without the whole thing becoming as flat as a 1950s encyclopaedia illustration.

Thanks Don and Andrew, I'm glad you like them .

I know what you mean about the 50's encyclopaedias Andrew ...I often thought that a lot of the sunny pictures shot on slide film at the time were always a little over-exposed, which added to the washed out look.

A correction .... The lens used for the last one was the SMC A50 f1.7 (not 250 as I wrote originally) .

These have turned out really well - no 3 especially has come out well, along with a good composition. No 5 has got a good oof background as well

Nice set Nigel, No 3 is my pic as well.

Regards

George

Thanks Andy and George I was pleased with the flare resistance I got from the Samyang.

Super result Nigel; very skilful and professional images.

Best Regards

Very nicely done Nigel, I think the mild HDR effect suits them well without making them look artificial.

For me, 3 and 4 stand head and shoulders above the others.

Regards
David

A pleasing set, Nigel, my favourite being number 3. It's also good to see effective use being made of one of the camera's built-in software features.

Cheers.
Philip

Thanks also Daroni, David and Philip for your responses , much appreciated. No 3 has that extra sparkle and contrast from the front lighting which is a benefit. I was certainly very pleased with the camera HDR feature here.... The jpeg files produced were very malleable in fact.

liking all these, 2 being my personal favourite. the in camera process does appear to be quite good ,will have to try it in a comparison with Photomatix. how many exposures does the camera use Nigel?

It's 3 Joe ... The mirror comes up and stays up for the sequence, and you hear the shutter cycling for the other two exposures. The last one seems to be the longest exposure, and it can be quite long especially with small apertures ... Here at F13 there was a good couple of seconds I think.

Of course we can't see these exact figures, and as well there is no way to control the range and spacing of the 3 exposures (as we can with auto-bracketing). Even though I used a tripod there is still blurring on some ferns due to ghosting caused by subject movement (there were some wind gusts).

The K3 has built on the HDR feature from the K7/K5 types, and has extra flexibility as it is possible to use the PDCU software to extract the base RAW files used for the in-camera HDR processing .... This is kind of a best of both worlds situation, as you can use the camera HDR jpeg, but have the option of taking the RAWs into a computer HDR programme to try and do better yourself!

thank s for that Nigel, Photomatix has a deghosting selection you can use once it has combined the shots which would sort out a bit of wind or camera movement and it does it very well. you can select the areas where movement has occurred so it has no affect on the rest of the image.

Yes, there's a lot more options and creative control with software such as Photomatix Pro. IIRC there's alignment options depending on whether you used a tripod or not ...

There's very little information on the mysteries of the Pentax in-camera HDR processing. I wonder if there is any automatic 'anti-ghosting' applied? I wouldn't have expected it to work wonders on my woods shots here as there are many ferns right across the frames that would have small movement blur.