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This panorama was captured yesterday evening as another winter storm was approaching Louisville. I wanted to shoot in Louisville Waterfront Park while it was covered in snow to capture the feeling of winter there. Louisville hasn’t had a winter with this much snow in many years and I wanted to get as much as I could before the temperature changes and it melts. I was walking up the access ramp to the Big Four bridge but didn’t take time to set up my tripod when I shot a three frame bracket set of +2, 0 and -2 EV exposures at f11. That decision was made in order to shoot quickly and get as many photos as possible before I set up my tripod on the bridge itself and the light faded. In retrospect I should have opened up my aperture because the overexposed frames were blurred due to the long shutter speed needed to capture the low light levels in the scene.

Once I started processing the bracket sets I discovered that all my handheld frames that were overexposed were blurred from camera movement. This left me with only an underexposed exposure and a normal exposure to work with for my HDR merger. I decided to use only those two exposures, -2 and 0 EV, in NIK HDR Efex Pro 2 and see what sort of results I would get. Much to my surprise the merged files had great detail in the shadow and highlight areas even though I wasn’t using any overexposed frames. I merged the two frames, applied the Balanced preset, adjusted the Detail slider to Accentuated and the Drama slider to Deep and saved the resulting HDR files back into Aperture 3. After I had done that for the nine frames I shot for the panorama I took them into Photoshop CS5 and ran the Automate/Photo Merge to create my panorama. After they were merged as a panorama I flattened the layers into a single image which I then returned to Aperture 3 for final adjustment and cropping.

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I followed the same basic procedure for this image except that I used my tripod which gave me a bracket set for each shot of +2, 0 and -2 EV exposures. I again used NIK HDR Efex Pro 2 to merge each section of the panorama and applied the Balanced preset with the Detail slider set to Accentuated and the Drama slider set to Deep. I then took all eleven merged HDR images into Photoshop CS5 and created the panorama. After that it was back into Aperture 3 for final adjustments to Saturation, Luminance, White Balance, Definition, Contrast, Mid-Contrast and Sharpening before making my final crop.

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The last image is another tripod mounted series of bracketed images shot with +2, 0 and -2 EV exposures and merged in NIK HDR Efex Pro 2 with the same preset settings as the other two images in this post. I followed the same processing steps using Photoshop CS5 and Aperture 3 to create the final image. I moved a little further north on the Big Four Bridge when I shot this set to give it a different perspective too.

Though I was able to salvage the handheld images I shot by discarding the over-exposed frames I still prefer to have a three frame bracket set of +2, 0 and -2 EV exposures to work with whenever I’m creating HDR images.