Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Night comes rolling in

Night comes rolling in

Another photograph from my cloudy day adventure last Friday. This is the St. Mary's Cemetery in Dekalb, Illinois as daylight faded into night. The cemetery contains some classic looking grave markers and one of the most attractive trees I've ever seen on its rolling terrain.

This was my second visit to this cemetery -- you can see the result of the first visit here.

This time, I wanted to use HDR to take advantage of the cloudy sky and fading light. This image is a blend of five separate exposures, each one a stop lighter than the previous. They were blended in Photomatix Pro. I shot the images as fast as the control wheel of my camera would allow me to adjust the exposure -- about two seconds between shots, but I still captured a lot of movement in the clouds, which the software smoothed over, creating the motion blur, which creates a kind of 3-d effect which I like. The drama of the sky and tree is accentuated by the low camera angle.

The tumult of this world goes on.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

9 comments:

SePp said...

indeed this is a cloud adventure. Beside from the cementery atmosphere this is a great picture!

Ron said...

The HDR really adds a new dimension as compared to the shot from your first visit. That is a great tree.

Jonas said...

Great picture with fantastic sky!

Unknown said...

Wonderful photographies, I score your blog to visit it.

Heidrun Peters said...

Hi James,
I have to remove your photos from my SUMMER Group reluctantly as I make it a habit to post new art work every month.
But I had such a hard time letting go of them that I now posted them on my rosewoman blog! (http://rosewoman.blogspot.com)
Especially "Sad Iris" has come so close to my heart I just want it around all the time.
Thanks very much again for your great work.

Gayle@Mountain Moma said...

Wow! Love the sky. Great pic!

James said...

Thanks for the comments, everyone.

Heidrun, thanks for featuring my photos ... and the encouragement to continue what I'm doing.

amanda guthrie said...

Beautiful! Hope you dont mind I am gonna share this on facebook it is gorgeous! Is it HDR? Love to know how you got the effect with the sky!

James said...

Hi Amanda, yes it is HDR. The clouds were moving very fast and the time lag between the five exposure I used to build the HDR created some blur, which I augmented in Photoshop Elements. Glad you like it.