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I drove all over Spring and The Woodlands today looking for a kiddy pool. Apparently they are seasonal and if you don’t buy them at the onset of the season, they sell out and you are S.O.L. I looked everywhere I could think might have them to no avail. WalMart, Target, Academy… all gone. I even checked pool supply stores on the off chance they would have some little inflatable something that could pass as a pool large enough for a Yorkie to swim in. It was ridiculous. The worst part was the looks I got from the employees at the stores when I asked if there were any left or if they even carried the product. I may as well have been asking for a pet Martian. Excuse me for not owning a band of screaming banshees that are 3 feet tall and keep me in the kiddy-item loop year round.

Anyhoo, I stopped and shot a little park near my office with the IR rig. I did a 5 shot bracketed exposure in single stop increments from -2 to +2 and then did a HDR tonal compression post process on the series. What I found was (and I should have known this)… I need to set the mirror lockup and auto-bracket from the tripod instead of manually adjusting the exposure compensation between shots. The clouds were actually blowing fast enough across the frame that the second or so between shots caused misalignment in the cloud boundaries. I ended up taking the correctly exposed (+/- 0 EC) shot and converting it into 5 TIFFs from a single RAW by shifting the exposure in post during RAW conversion. I did the same HDR conversion on those images that were perfectly aligned and got the shot pictured above. I can tell the dynamic range in the separate image stack is much better, but I’ll know for next time. Live and learn. After I finished my little experiment, I shot the image below handheld of the same scene at a different focal length and orientation. It is not HDR processed at all.

ps. I don’t know how to make Expression Engine dynamically resize the center column when I post an image that hasn’t been resized to fit the fixed middle column width. I know it looks like shit, but I’m just that inept at web manipulation. It doesn’t do it automagically like someone previously suggested. Perhaps other publishing systems do, but this one doesn’t to the best of my knowledge. Of course, in the almost 6 years I’ve been posting here, I’ve been through 4 publishing engines and this is, so far, my favorite… so I guess I shouldn’t bitch too much.