HDR Vertorama Drama

On my way back down from the Fort William Mountain Film festival I went on a bit of a detour which ended up taking in Castle Stalker and Loch Creran near to Oban and then across to Schiehallion via the Crannog on Loch Tay. So yeah quite a detour.

I had planned to stay on the west coast and explore the shoreline, hoping to get some pics of the sea with snow capped island hills in the background, but the weather wasn't playing ball with snow showers blowing through and extended periods of poor visibility. All the weather reports said head east, so I heeded them and ended up getting some wonderfull evening light beside Schiehallion.

Schiehallion could mean a couple of things, either 'Fairy Mountain' or 'Continuous Cloud' thankfully it was more fairylike and less cloudlike when I was there. For the fact fans it is almost exactly on the midpoint of the Scottish Mainland, east/west and north/south. It was also used to estimate the weight of the world by measuring how much a pendulum was displaced by it's gravity.

Anyway I digress, the clouds cleared and I was presented with two very different light levels in the top and bottom of the image, I would normally attempt to correct this using graduated filters and bracketing the exposures, this time I skipped on the grad and took 2 sets of bracketed images at +1 1/3, 0, -1 1/3. With one set centered around the exposure for the sky and snow, and one set for the foreground.

Each set of bracketed images were blended using Photomatix and tonemapped into a 16 bit image. The two tonemapped images where then stitched together using the amazing panoramic feature in Photoshop to create one blended, tonemapped and stitched image in the vertorama format. The final image was subject to the usual colour correction, contrast tweaks and general photoshop work before the end result was released to the world. A long process, but one that I think is work it.

HDR Vertorama Drama

The reeds in the foreground proved to much to resist and I finished up the long weekend in my wellies in the mud trying not to get stuck while I took the shot below. The sun was setting, it was dead still and I could hear an eagle calling high above. All in all not a bad place to be on a Monday....


This one a more traditional version with ND Grads to compensate for the sky.