Each spring at Illinois Canyon, Starved Rock State Park in north-central Illinois, nature puts on a show in the form of a phenomenal expanse of Virginia Bluebells. Due to an extremely cold spring, last year's display was late; I'm hoping it's more or less normal this year as I'm planning a short trip to the park around April 18.
This shot was taken around 9 AM on May 4, 2008; ordinarily, I'd have viewed this scene for a few moments, leaving my camera in the bag, and moved on (another bluebell spot, further up the canyon, was entirely in shade). But I decided to experiment with this scene briefly. The light wasn't all that harsh--a quick spot metering suggested that I'd almost be able to hold detail in the highlights and shadows, but not quite. So I set up and fired off five bracketed exposures. A couple of days later, I was playing with an HDR blend and threw out one of the exposures, eventually tonemapping the remaining four shots twice in Photomatix and then combining the two tonemapped images manually in PS. The goal was essentially to make the image appear more or less as the eye saw it rather than the typical default camera rendering of blown highlights and blocked up shadows.
D200, Nikkor 12-24, polarizer
C&C welcome
Posted by Toni Lankerd on April 2, 2009 at 5:01 PM
The HDR blend worked perfectly in this situation, Kerry! What a great scene! Just curious....what f-stop did you use?
Thanks for sharing the image and the techs. I am getting geared up for the spring bloom..should only be a few weeks away.
Posted by Brian Vance on April 4, 2009 at 11:06 AM
This definitely screams spring, Kerry. It looks like it is part of the spring banner. Thanks for sharing the PP work as well, very informative. I'm guessing it was a very calm morning, and you didn't have to contend with the flowers wiggling around? I'm not sure I like the trees to flowers ratio in the composition, as the flowers hold my attention, but there's not a lot of interest in the trees for me. Thanks for sharing these beautiful spring colors!
Beautiful shot. I haven't seen Starved Rock in the spring, only in the middle of summer. While still a very nice area, it was more of a "get out and explore" trip than a photography trip. Good job capturing the dynamic range, I couldn't even tell it was a blended shot. The colors are spectacular.
Discussion
7 repliesThis shot was taken around 9 AM on May 4, 2008; ordinarily, I'd have viewed this scene for a few moments, leaving my camera in the bag, and moved on (another bluebell spot, further up the canyon, was entirely in shade). But I decided to experiment with this scene briefly. The light wasn't all that harsh--a quick spot metering suggested that I'd almost be able to hold detail in the highlights and shadows, but not quite. So I set up and fired off five bracketed exposures. A couple of days later, I was playing with an HDR blend and threw out one of the exposures, eventually tonemapping the remaining four shots twice in Photomatix and then combining the two tonemapped images manually in PS. The goal was essentially to make the image appear more or less as the eye saw it rather than the typical default camera rendering of blown highlights and blocked up shadows.
D200, Nikkor 12-24, polarizer
C&C welcome
I've really been slipshod about reporting the technical information; sorry about that.
24mm, ISO 200, f/16 @ 1/20, 1/80, 1/40 and 1/10