Last Friday I took a trip out to the old Longview Farm in Lee’s Summit Missouri with a good photog friend of mine, Keith Moyer.  Keith hosts an awesome blog following his HDR and photography endeavors, Time To Take Pictures.  I saw these awesome pillars on his blog after he mentioned them while we were shooting the Kauffman Center.   After taking a look at his shots of Longview, I knew I had to get out there.  It really is a beautiful place to shoot and lucky enough for us, it was insanely overgrown!

Unfortunately for us the sky was not working in our favor for HDR, it was very bright without a cloud in the sky.  These types of skies make HDR a nightmare as the blown out background turns into a mess on the high side of the brackets.  I even dialed the exposure composition down a full stop, but still no luck.  I didn’t find out later when I got home that many of my brackets were blown out highlight crap!  I will just have to go back when the clouds are in!

Photo Tip For The Week:

Check your live preview often!  I learned a little bit too late that there was an issue with my brackets.  When you are downloading the brackets is the wrong time to find out the highlights are entirely too blown out.  Check the live preview on the scene, scroll through your brackets and use the blinkies.  You know the red blinky thing that tells you highlights are blown, and the blue blinky that tells you shadows are clipped.  If I would have looked a little closer at those, instead of being like a kid in a candy store in this Urbex junkies dream, I would have seen a problem on the scene and adjusted accordingly.  I did compensate for -1, but I could have gone at least -2 to get a better product.

Blake Rudis

f.64 Academy and f.64 Elite are the brainchildren of Blake Rudis. While he is a landscape photographer, he is most passionate about post-processing images in Photoshop and mentoring others.

For Blake, it's all about the art and process synergy. He dives deep into complex topics and makes them easy to understand through his outside-the-box thinking so that you can use these tricks in your workflow today!