A shot from underneath Clacton pier at dawn (click on it for a larger version). It's actually 5 shots merged into one using a process known as tonemapping, which takes a series of pictures at varying exposures and averages them out. It's the photographic technique equivalent of Marmite, largely due to the number of badly processed images that are out there. It's easy to turn everything up to the max and end up with something that looks completely false and unrealistic.
I'm not suggesting that this one of mine is particularly great but it does represent what I actually saw at the time, i.e. the bright rays of the sun making shade patterns between the columns and also the detail below the boards. A camera can't capture the range of contrast that our eyes/brain interpret so a single photo is either too bright or too dark. There are some good HDR tutorials on the web, with the two best that I've found being:
- Trey Ratcliffe's Stuck In Customs, which is free, or
- David Nightingale's Chromasia site, which requires a subscription but has a wider range of training
Both have also recently released books on HDR technique (links are to Amazon UK): A World in HDR by Trey and Practical HDR by David. I've not read either of them yet but since both are excellent exponents of the art, they should be worth a look.
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