167 - Ten Minutes Before Sunrise

Three images and not one even remotely usable! Not exactly my most productive day 🙂

I have to feed you from preserves, so here is an image from early January, taken as seven bracketed exposures, 1 EV apart, shot in aperture priority mode with the Nikon 18-200 at 20mm and f5.6. I took the burst about ten minutes before sunrise.

This rendition was merged to HDR in Photoshop, tone mapped with Photomatix, again tone mapped and converted to 16 bit with Photoshop’s local adaption method, straightened out with PTLens, converted to Lab, and there treated with several curves for contrast and saturation, partially applied to certain areas by using masks. Did I forget something? I guess no 😉

Did it look that way? Yes! Absolutely!

The Song of the Day is “Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise” in the version from Helen Merrill’s 1957 album “The Nearness of You”. Sound samples are here and here, although you really must hear the whole song and how it speeds up when she begins to swing on “For the passions that thrill love”. Brilliant.