My new 5D Mk3 has an HDR function which works pretty well, I guess. You can get it to do just plain HDR or ask it to apply various filters. I went out into Ginny's Garden and played with that feature a bit and decided that I really didn't like the "artistic" results that I obtained. I have to admit that I don't know much about HDR. As a matter of fact it didn't dawn on me that the HDR part is simply combining a number of images to extend the range of exposure values that can be captured. I thought all the pretty colors came from that process. Boy, I was wrong about that.

Over the years I have admired the work of my friend Gordon ( http://www.pbase.com/merriwolf ). He does a lot of work that is just beautiful to look at. He can get colors to come out and make a beautiful photo. He has thousands of them. When I look at some others' work, I am somewhat taken aback because they are clearly over processed. I don't like that style very much because it looks like a machine generated photo in some cartoon studio.

So what does all this have to do with today's photo? Well, I decided to look into enhancing color and I got pretty confused real quick. I didn't know if I was going to have to buy some expensive software. I found a video on YouTube by Julienne Kost who is a pretty savvy photoshop user and photographer. She was using Merge to HDR Pro which is a plugin that comes with newer versions of photoshop. As she was going through the demonstration I noticed that many of the sliders she was using are there in Lightroom 2.0, which is the version that I am currently using. This is good!

So, I looked at the photos I took at sunrise Tuesday during my first trip to the field with my new camera and picked one to play with. One of the things that has always struck me about many photos is they never look quite as good as what I remember that I saw. So I set out with an objective to see what I could do on a non-HDR image. I hasten to add that this particular scene was not HDR material because the histogram was nicely centered with nothing blown out.

After quite a while trying things and liberal use of CTRL-Z I ended up with something that wasn't great, but neither was it awful. It more resembled what I remembered that I saw, bluer sky, more vibrant sunshine. Top is the original, bottom is the fixed version.

Now, I have to ask myself how much time I want to spend working with these techniques. It will take a lot of practice and learning to get acceptable results. I have a feeling that it will be something for me to play with when it is raining outside or it is too hot to go out and play.