HDR Landscape

Characteristics of this type of shot: Added depth in shadow areas without noise.

Ingredients: When you combine bracketed photos into a single HDR image in Lightroom or Camera Raw, one of the biggest advantages (besides extra tonal range) is that you can open the shadow areas up much more than you normally would without introducing a bunch of noise (like under the bridge and in the rocks) and because of the expanded total range, you can push things a bit more when you edit the photo, and that gives the image a “look.” This shot is taken from the same exact location as the shot on the previous page—Thor’s Well. I just turned around and saw this scene when looking back to the road, so I took the shot.

Location: Thor’s Well, Yachats, Oregon, USA, looking back toward Spouting Horn and the Oregon Coast Highway.

Camera settings: Shot in aperture priority mode; 28–300mm f/3.5–5.6 lens at 28mm; ISO 100 at f/6.3; shutter speed: 1/160 of a second. Why f/6.3? I clearly wasn’t paying attention—ideally, I should have shot it at f/11.