Day 145: The Reclamation of Nature

I've wanted to take this photo for quite some time now, but I'm glad that I waited until spring and the greenness of it. There is a construction vehicle of some sort that sits back off the road in front of some trees and such. It's been sitting there for quite some time now, and I always mean to pull off and take a few shots of it. Today I remembered.

This first one is just to give you an idea of what it is.

1/30 sec. exposure at F/9. ISO 100.
Click image for larger version.

As you can see, the greens are very dull and the sky is almost completely washed out at the normal exposure. Buh-buh-buh-BUUH! HDR to the rescue! I snapped a bunch of different exposures (I usually only do three to composite) to see what effect that might have, if any, on the resulting composite.

I didn't have my tripod, so this next one is a bit strange (when Photomatix composites the images together it aligns the different exposures together as best as it can, but if there is too much variance you get a little bit of ghosting or skewing of the image as seen below).

Photo composited in Aperture using Photomatix HDR Plug-In.
Click image for larger version.

The color in that one is still pretty dull, and if you notice at the top of the trees there is a little bit of a ghost-treeline. Also (and this is the part of the image that I think came out cool), the truck itself is a little smooshed and skewed looking. It's not major, but there's definitely something a little off with it.

This last one is my favorite of the day. The colors came out really nice (after some tweaking in Aperture), giving it a cartoony, painted quality.

Photo composited in Aperture using Photomatix HDR Plug-In.
Click image for larger version.

I really like the tones of the grass. I tried to make the truck a bit more yellow, but all that really did was give the grass a better color for some reason.

I want to find more things like this to photograph. I love the image of nature taking both taking back what it once had, as well as the image of nature domination a tool of man's destruction. Yeah, I know. I'm one of those people. I know there is a place south of me that I used to drive past when I picked up my CSA last summer. It's an old abandoned factory and it's full of trees and shrubs that have fought their way back through the concrete. It's striking to see. Maybe I'll have to make a drive down there soon. And now back to L.A. Noire...