Behind the Shot: Big Badlands Sunrise
Greetings from the bleak land of cold and wind
This is my first blog from Badlands National Park in South Dakota. I am in day 5 of my Artist in Residency. Today, they sky was completely overcast and, as I was a little under the weather, I stayed in bed late and avoided the veiled sunrise. Later today, I have a people shoot scheduled as I will be photographing park rangers working with the public.
Sunrise at Big Badlands Overlook
The shot shown above was taken my first sunrise in the Badlands. I drove from my apartment to the formations near the first overlook in the park. I waited in relatively mild temperatures (30° F) with little wind for the sun to come up. This shot was tripod mounted Aperture Priority exposure made on a Canon 5D with a 17-40mm F4L. ISO was set to 100 and the aperture was at F8. This is an HDR exposure made from three separate exposures taken at –2EV, 0, and +2 EV. The images were processed in Lightroom and then ported to Photomatix 3.1 Beta via the new plug-in export functionality.
Beyond the HDR processing the image received a couple of target adjustments in image editing software to pump up the contrast individually in the foreground and then the clouds. A quick sharpening and the image was down-sampled to JPG.
This was by far my easiest sunrise capture of my stay thus far. The next day the temperatures sank into the low teens and the wind picked up. I still rose from bed every morning and stood in the cold but the conditions were considerably more miserable. The images, however, came out nice-worth the wait in the cold.
I am not sure when this post will make it live on the net. The world in which I find myself is scarce of internet, cell phone signal and amenities like gas stations and restaurants. I have a little last minute shopping to do so a short road trip is in order. Perhaps I can find an uplink then.
PS. I found an Internet Gas Station/Snack Bar/General Store.
Rikk Flohr © 2008
December 6, 2008 at 12:38 pm
WONDERFUL picture and landscape Rikk!!