Old Countryside Barn

During the last week, I have been doing some scouting for the upcoming duck and goose season which allowed me to see the sunset at different locations. Driving by the below homestead with the barn and hay bales along with the cattails I knew I had a great image if I could capture the sunset in it.
Wanting to use the bracketing feature on the Nikon D90 and having different exposed images, I used the Slik tripod to get a solid base. Like most of my landscape photography, I put the camera to AV mode and shot in RAW. Needing a wide angle, I used the Nikon 18-105mm lense and because I was on a tripod and using the bracketing feature, I turned off the autofocus and VR. Turning off both of these in this situation helped to create a sharper image. I also used the self timer to get my hands off the camera and allowed the camera to fire off the bracketed images.

I processed these as RAW files in ViewNX and changed the white balance to direct sunlight. Needing to combine the multiply images into one, I used EasyHDR to create the below images. EasyHDR allowed me to combine the five different exposed images into one. To finalize the image, I adjusted the saturation level and also the tone curve to get the look I wanted to get.

The first two images were from one night of capturing the scene and then after reviewing them, I realized I needed to get the barn and hay bales more into the image so I went back for another chance.

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