Dawn Patrol at Lake Panorama National GC

During the month of April on a couple different mornings, I arrived at the golf course when the sun was starting to rise to take some shots of the golf course in the early morning hours. Not having done this before, I didn't know what to expect but I was hoping to capture some dew on the grass along with the warm yellow glow of the sun hitting the grass.

Using the Nikon D90 and 18-105mm lense I mounted it on my Slik tripod to allow me to use the bracketing feature on the camera to help with HDR work and also to be able to use a 3 second time delay on the shutter. This allowed me to keep my hands off the camera while the shutter was being released. However, when reviewing the shots, I learned that the wind caused the trees to move enough were I couldn't use different photographs for HDR work. Instead I just had to use one single photograph and adjust the exposure compensation in ViewNX.

The first series of photographs were processed in ViewNX as RAW files and then straight into EasyHDR were they were tone mapped to create the HDR photograph. EasyHDR also has the ability to change the tone curve on the image so I tweaked that as well to get the look I was wanting too. I saved them as TIFF's and then finished processing them in PSE8 which involved alittle sharpening and cloning of objects I didn't want in the image such as birds and cart signs.

The second series of photographs were processed in ViewNX has RAW files and I adjusted the white balance and used a custom Picture Control that I created for these sunrise images. The images were saved as TIFF's and then finished them out in PSE8 with sharpening, cloning and alittle adjustment on Action Curves and Channel Mixer.

After finishing all of these up, I was happy with my work and will be going out at dawn and also at dusk to capture the beauty of the golf course during these times.

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The second series from the morning outings that are not HDR.

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