The impossible light

Sometimes I see a shot and think that would be awesome, but achieving it from a technical stand point can be a bit of barrier, i suppose more correctly its probably a effort barrier now more than technical, i think this image sums that comment up nicely.

Its a 3 frame wide panorama and as you can probably imagine with the sun on one side and detail trees in the middle its a pretty high dynamic range scene, one that the human eyes sees and goes, 'wow sweet' 🙂 well mine do any way 🙂 but the poor old camera (even with its whizz bang technology) goes 'arrghh too much light and shadow whatcha doing to me? ' 🙂

So to help out the poor camera and in all honesty I did not really expect this shot to work out (to a level worth pursuing), I bracketed each shot, this left me with a 9 shot picture (3 frames bracketed (-3ev, 0, +3ev). I stitched up the panorama with the brackets as separate layers and then manually masked the bright and dark areas to increase the dynamic range, by this stage i was thinking the amount of effort is not quite proportional to the outcome, especially when comparing to the long exposure shot I took a few minutes afterwards (see here: https://plus.google.com/+GerardBlacklock/posts/dUNKtPoh1Ay) the actually effort at the scene and also at the computer was significantly less for the linked image 🙂

anyway, it did all work to a level that at the very least deserved to be posted here on gplus 🙂

Exif love:
3 shot panorama (each frame bracketed)
D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35 mm f4 @ 24mm Aperture: f18 and Shutter Speed: 18s (over exp) 5s (normal exp) 1s (under exp)
ISO 100
Out front – LEE GND (0.6x)