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A few weeks ago the shaft of drilling head on the BG 40 snapped off while drilling a 12 foot diameter hole inside the pier casing. There were numerous attempts made to secure the broken drill head to remove it from the casing each of which required a diver to go down and assess the situation. In this image the diver and his assistant are checking the diver’s helmet and air supply lines prior to his dive. Once he was properly geared up he entered a wire cage and was lowered into the casing so that he could perform his tasks to secure lifting rigging to extract the drill head from the casing. The lines on the ground are the diver’s air supply as well as his communication link to his assistant and the rest of the dive team. The air tank on the diver’s back is a safety backup in case something were to fail with the air supply lines while he is underwater and provide a supply of air to allow him to safely return to the surface.

This is a three exposure bracket set of +2, 0 and -2 EV exposures that I then merged in NIK HDR Efex Pro 2 with 60% anti-ghosting applied to minimize the ghosting caused by the movement of the two men as they geared up for the dive. I applied a preset that I built for this particular day’s shooting that intensified the colors and compensated for some of the overexposure that the bright morning sun caused. After completing the merger and applying the needed tone adjustments I returned the image to Aperture 3 where I applied adjustments to the separate color channels, contrast and sharpening. One of the primary reasons I like using multiple exposures and HDR techniques is the way I can open up shadow details yet retain the highlights in a scene. HDR allows me to render the image in a way that closely resembles the way the human eye sees but the camera sensor cannot record in a single exposure.