I ended up getting a great opportunity to get this HDR shot on the farm a few weeks ago.  I’ll let you in on the idea… first, here’s the shot.

It was a beautiful day… and the clouds looked HUGE. Generally it tends to be difficult to get the depth of the blue skies and the bright puffy whites of the clouds without blowing out the image a bit, and losing a lot in the process.  Even though there wasn’t a gigantic amount of contrast that day, I though that I could push it.  I had my Manfrotto Digi tripod, which is lightweight, and pretty bombproof… so I chucked it down, and snapped 6 shots rapidly… all with differing exposures (I stayed on aperture priority with a wireless remote and let the shutter fly). After a bit of time in the studio, I ended up tweaking the HDR settings, and, well… here it is. HDR is a kind of quirky beast, but I felt like I nailed it towards the end of the post-shoot session.  I especially like the way the tonemapping altered the coloring and saturation of the soil and plants in the foreground.

Feel free to fire off any questions… and of course, prints are always for sale….