Equipment Used: Nikon D90 with 24-120 mm f4 lense, Nikon SB-700
Speedlight, Slik Pro 500DX tripod & Viltrox Remote.
The local farmers had a chance to roll up some hay a few weeks ago so
one evening; I headed out to hopefully capture a nice sunset over a hay field
with the local FC Coop in the background.
I used the above equipment with the following settings: aperture of f9,
VR off and manual focus on the lense. ISO was either at 200 or 400 and the
exposure compensation ranged from 0 to -3. The EC was set to negative when I
used the SB-700 so I could have a darker background and use the speedlight to
exposure the close hay bale. The SB-700 was mounted on a piece of conduit that
I stuck in the ground near the hay bale.
In NX-D, the white balance was changed to shade and picture control to
either landscape or nature-landscape along with a small increase of saturation.
These adjustments helped bring out the beautiful colors of the scene.
Adjustments were also made to the exposure compensation and shadow sliders. Two
HDR images were created in Easy HDR from the -1, 0 & +1 exposure compensated
Tiff files that were created in NX-D.
Photoshop Elements 11 was used to finalize the images with the first
step of using the clone tool to get rid of unwanted objects in the images. Next
I used curve adjustments and layer masks to fine tune the exposure of the sky.
Around the hay bale, the speedlights created more light on the ground than I
thought looked natural so I used the dodge/burn tools to try to reduce that effect. I
also used PSE 11’s photomerge tool to combine different exposed sky and foreground
images to help create the look I was going for. The final step was using a high
pass sharpen filter to sharpen the images.
During this shoot, I did run into a problem of not being able to fire
my SB-700’s if I was not close to them. I wanted to sit one up behind a bale to
make a rim light around the bale but was unable too with my current equipment.
Hopefully I’ve since solved that problem with the purchase of Vello’ speedlight
triggers that don’t require line of sight.
#1.
#2.
#3. HDR
#4.
#5.
#6.
#7.
#8.
#9. HDR
#10.
