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[Scottwdw]

Tim had a few HDR threads for the ToL so I thought I would add my own.  I think the clouds and time of day helped.



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[PolynesianMedic]

Scott, I have two words for this shot.

Simply Brilliant!

[Dan]

Neat.  I'm getting an odd effect from it.  I look at it and I tend to think of it as something like a painting or something, I don't perceive it as a picture.  I don't really get the impression of HDR, I get the impression of "it's not a photograph".

My take on it is that the sky seems inappropriate, though.  The bright colors suggests sunlight, or perhaps a dramatic sunset, the clouds look incongruous in the context of the appearance of the lighting and the bold colors.

[Scottwdw]

Thanks, Jeff!  I've had a hard time catching the ToL in good lighting over the years.

Dan, HDR does tend to polarize people as to if they like it or not.  In this case, I do like the clouds as it makes the lighting more dramatic for me.  I look for such lighting all the time when the Sun lights up the foreground with dark clouds in the background.  I have lots of photos of the ToL with Florida blue sky's. 

Would I have liked it better with clouds being colored by a setting Sun, you betcha!  However, at WDW, sometimes we don't have the luxury of waiting for the light as I had to get over to MK for a dining reservation with my family. 

I tried using various settings in Photomatix.  Some more realistic with others totally off the wall and really liked how this looked.  Maybe not photo-realistic but colorful and fun.  Thanks for your comments, Dan. 

Here is a photo of the same scene:

[WDWFigment]

My take on it is that the sky seems inappropriate, though.  The bright colors suggests sunlight, or perhaps a dramatic sunset, the clouds look incongruous in the context of the appearance of the lighting and the bold colors.

Agreed.  I wasn't going to say anything at first because I don't want it to seem like I'm just criticizing all of your HDR shots.  Again, I think this is something that is typical of HDR processing: "storm clouds" even on sunny days.  I know you can't do layers, but how I would solve this problem if you could is to layer the original image on top of this one, and mask the HDR image's sky.

[WDWFigment]

^So that is an unprocessed (or minimally processed) photo of the HDR image above?  In that case, I take back what I said--you really did have 'storm' clouds and a beautifully lit tree at the same time.  Nothing processing wise you can do to fix that (IMO) that would really make it look any more natural than what you already did.

Nice work!

[Scottwdw]

Thanks, Tom.  As the Pixelmania! gang will confirm, there was a lot of clouds around that day.  The Sun had just gotten low enough with a clearing sky to the west to light up the tree.  This was taken around 3:30pm on December 5 with sunset occurring about two hours later. 

During the trip, when I saw subjects with a lot of light and dark areas, I put my camera in bracket mode and took three shots.  Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. 

[prettypixie]

Ooo, nice!

[Chris Bond]

Love what you did with that image.  Thanks for sharing.