Maples Creek Lake HDR

It's been a long time since I've processed an HDR image. Primarily because, in most cases, I don't need it. My Sony has a pretty good dynamic range and I just really don't care much for processing bracketed images and tone mapping anymore. But for this shot at Maples creek Lake, the contrast between the sky and the trees on the far banks was just too broad. My thought process was to bracket 5 shots at +/- 2EV at 1 EV intervals and see what they looked like on the computer.

Having recently investing in the DxO version of the NIK Collection, I took this opportunity to run these bracketed images through the HDR Efex Pro 2. Hadn't used that in LONG time, but it's there, so there you go. I was pleasantly surprised at the resulting tone mapped image. It was not overdone and terribly editable, allowing me to generate an image that looked very much like the scene I witnessed with my own two eyes!

That reflection, huh? Yeah, it was pretty amazing.