The Shoot
It was a blistering hot summer day in 2008, and I still had my Nikon D200 which can do a decent frame rate so I was able to get a 7-exposure AEB going with this cheerful-looking children’s play area in Las Vegas. I remember the temperatures were still around 100-110 degrees fahrenheit that day, hence the missing children and park-goers. I only took one set of auto-bracketed exposures so I had to make it count – so I propped the camera on something – I think it was a metal piece on another jungle-jim set. I squeezed off 7 exposures using the “cH” setting to make sure I minimized hand shake. The AEB was in the range of -4, -2 2/3, -1 1/3, 0, +1 1/3, +2 2/3, +4 EV.

The Processing
The vibrance of the red, yellow and blue playground set definitely needed to be preserved. Halos needed to be controlled in the sky in Photomatix. Surprisingly Photomatix was able to align it almost perfectly. I wanted to desaturate the sky a little so that the blue in the playground set would be more prominent, but I think overall it turned out well. The details were preserved in the dark areas under the canopy such as the underside and interior of those slide tubes. The only halo that is noticable is on the right side of the image in the sky – which I’ll live with, considering the rest of the image “works”.

Here is our second set of free auto-bracketed RAW files for you to download and try out your killer HDR skills. If you use it, just please post a link back to this page. There is nothing like sharing and giving back to the community, enjoy! Click here to download (32mb). Note, that this was hand-held, you need to align the exposures using your HDR merging software.