Florida Weather
Posted on 24. Jul, 2008 by Terry Reinert in Photography
This time of year you can pretty much set your clocks by the afternoon thunderstorms in Florida. We get a lot of them on the central east coast due to the sea breeze and the geography of the area. Bill and I went out to try and get some lightning shots Tuesday afternoon but by the time we got to a good location it was already pouring. I shot a few frames from inside the car where my Canon 5D was protected from becoming an over-sized paper weight. The following photo is my latest HDR photo taken like all the others from past posts… basically, the camera was set to bracket mode with +/- 2.0 EV and the drive mode set to multi-shot. I hand held the camera with my elbows braced on the interior of the car for stability. I used Photoshop CS3 to merge the three photos into an HDR file and saved it in Radiance format. I then used Photomatix Pro to do one round of tone mapping and then saved it as a 16-bit TIFF. Then I took it back into Photoshop CS3 for minor touch ups and framing.
The next photo is a quick shot I took while the car was moving. I like how the lights on all the vehicles turned out. I really over did the processing on this because I like the harsher look to it. It was all done in Lightroom 2.0′s ‘develop’ mode. I basically maxed out the contrast, recovery, fill light, and blacks sliders. Then dropped the saturation a bit and adjusted the brightness and exposure sliders until I got the right look. I then exported it to a PSD file, opened it in Photoshop CS3, did the framing and sharpening, and saved it out as a JPEG for posting. Simple stuff.
Bill posted a good shot he got of a storm yesterday. I was not out on that trip but it looks like I should have been. Check it out on his blog.
Related posts:
My Social Media
Advertisement
Bill
24. Jul, 2008
Very nice! I like how that HDR came out. Most of my photos from that day came out pretty crappy, but so it goes…you win some and you lose some.
It certainly doesn’t look like it was raining as hard as it was in that HDR photo!
-Bill