A bit of experimentation in the mountains

I really haven't spent enough time around the mountains this January, just a few brief afternoon visits it seems.

Today was another brief afternoon visit to Shintaro's for coffee who complained about the lack of updates to the site, as did Torazo the other day.  Shintaro did however say how much he liked the panorama painting of Rene's that I posted the other day - http://www.niigata-nishikigoi.com/node/1474 - although stated that when he first saw the post he though it was about 'just another panorama picture I'd taken'.

As we sat a ray of light shined briefly across the mountains, all too soon it was gone.  We popped to look at the tosai in the Koi house behind the home.

As I was about to depart a glimmer of light appeared again.

I headed to the property of Kato san who has the gallery in Mushigame.  As I got there the sun was just dipping behind the horizon.

I grabbed the 3 shots quickly below at slightly different exposures.

Something I've been reading a lot about, and been reading a lot about, is HDR images.  Basically combining differently exposed images to maximise the range of light and dark in an image above what a camera would normally capture.

I popped the 3 images above into Adobe Photoshop's automatic HDR image mode and this is the outcome.  Whether my images were ideal for this process to start with I've no idea, the resulting images is punchier than those that it came from.  Will be playing more with this technique.

Moving down the mountains I again just caught the sun in Koguriyama, the 2 images below both from Photoshop's HDR mode. In a single exposure it would be impossible to retain the foreground brightness with the contrast in the sky required to show the bright colours.

This one's just a straight shot.

Be interested to hear from anyone who has any experience of HDR.