Today we will be starting a series of “how-to” or “behind-the-scenes” blogs of the technique behind the actual shoot or the processing of some of my HDR work. We will start off with this image I captured while on a Valley of Fire trip north of Las Vegas (2008).

The shoot
The sun was setting, and we were driving from point to point at the national park trying to catch the views before the sun set. As I was about to get back into the car, I saw this perfect alignment of the car, the sun, the curvy road and the time of day – so I just had to kneel, make sure to get a good composition using the 15mm fisheye (I’m glad it didn’t turn out to be overly distorted) and snapped off a series of auto-exposure-bracketed shots hand-held using the continuous mode on my Canon EOS 5D. I’m pretty pleased with the results where you can see details in the darker parts of the car (away from the sun) and the mixture of warm and cold colors in the sky.

Click to view large

The processing
The processing was done in Photomatix Pro 3 using details enhancer and then polished off in Adobe Lightroom 2. In photomatix I wanted to keep it more real, and not “fantasy” HDR – plus since I had a white car in the scene, I couldn’t get some nice reflections off the paint. After exporting as 16-bit tiff from Photomatix, I was able to further edit the saturation and curves to finally end up with the final result. The only regret was that I couldn’t get more clouds in the shot and I wish I could get the car to be more white in color. Gear used: Canon EOS 5D with Canon EF 15mm Fisheye lens

We’ve seen lots of nice HDR car imagery but only a very select few are memorable. It is in the processing and the tones of the image that makes it stand out, just like this classic muscle car – a 1970’s Mustang done right in HDR. Notice the vibrant reds and the dramatic sky – the whole image really comes together nicely.

By stevoarnold