Day 51: Crossing the Horizon

Greetings! I took a little trip today. Not a big trip. Just a little one. After I left the library this afternoon, I decided to drive to Yellow Creek Park. It's just outside of Indiana. Unfortunately it was a very grey and dreary day. That means that none of the photos were all that exceptional. But I did some 'speramenting in Aperture and they ended up coming out kind of cool.

This first one was of a tree. At first the tree had birds in it. But like every other attempt at photographing birds, they flew away from me. I still ended up with a decent photo though. I was trying to highlight the brown tones as much as possible (it was the only color around). The initial shot didn't bring them out too much, but after some tweaking in Aperture I got this.

1/4 sec. exposure at F/8. ISO 200.
Click image for larger version.

The sky was bleach white in the original exposure. It was the only way that I could get the colors on the ground to come out. All of the exposures that I took that showed the texture of the sky made the ground/trees too dark. Ah, the wonders of technology.

The next two photos are for demonstration purposes only. Since the day was so grey and dreary, the resulting photos was grey and dreary. And boring. I needed to spice 'em up. Spicy. Spice-ay. I took them crooked!

1/15 sec. exposure at F/8.
ISO 200.

1/15 sec. exposure at F/8.
ISO 200.

But that's not spicy. That's slightly mild, with a bit of kick. I want SPICY! SPICE-AY! HOT! So I merged the photos in HDR. Normally HDR is for merging varying exposures of the exact same framing of the shot, not two different frames at the same exposure. Here's the result (after a square cropping (there was a ton of dark noise on the right side of the new image, so I just cropped it out)).

Above two photos merged in HDR.
Click image for larger version.

There's still a little noise that shows up in the upper right part of the "cross", but overall, I think this is a pretty neat photo. I tried to use some brushes to get rid of the noise, but it kept ruining it more. So I just went with it.

Hope you guys liked today's photos. If you do, don't forget to comment for the February contest! Check out the rules here. SPICY!