Creating a Car Portrait-Sunset on the Beach

This high dynamic range (HDR) image was created from 11 bracketed, raw shots with widely varying exposures in hopes of simultaneously capturing detail in the incredibly bright, setting fireball and in the really dark wheel wells. As these images all need to be pin registered in the digital darkroom, the bracketed shots were taken using a rock-solid tripod weighted down with a sandbag. For the gearheads among you, the brackets were taken with a full-frame, 21-megapixel DSLR with a 16-35mm f/2.8 L II wide-angle zoom lens at 24mm. To reduce vibrations, mirror lock-up was enabled and the camera/tripod combination was not touched!!! This would be impossible using the DSLR alone as only 3 bracketed shots can be taken sequentially. To increase this to a depth of 11 brackets, and work with mirror lock-up another high-tech device was employed. As you can see below, the resultant bracketed images are very unimpressive.

In the next post, we'll address the artistic approach to transforming the boring bracketed shots into an artistic car portrait--the secret sauce !!!