Little of This, Little of That

I was looking through my shots to see what images might make decent postcards for sale in the Waterford canal area. This was prompted by my post of a couple of weeks ago, on April 29th, which included shots of the Waterford Harbor Visitor's Center, Lock E2 and the old Champlain Canal bypass.

I remembered that I had taken some shots of the Visitor's Center the day after Tropical Storm Irene passed through and raised the Mohawk River well above its banks. You can read my blog post of that day here. I save all my RAW files on a portable hard drive, organized by camera body and month, and went back to the August, 2011, EOS 5D folder to find those original files.

In one of the more recent updates, Canon added an HDR processing tool to it's Digital Photo Professional software. While I usually prefer the results of Photomatix Essentials, the DPP tool will apply HDR type processing to a single file. As I wasn't bracketing exposures when I was shooting the Irene flooding, I decided to try the tool on one of the shots of the Visitor's Center.

Here is the original photo, processed as I was able without the HDR tool:

Canon EOS 5D, EF 24-70 f/2.8L USM at 70mm, f/5.6, 1/200 sec., ISO 200

Reducing the brightness would simply take all the texture out of the trees and brightening the shot would blow out the highlights even more. Here is the result of processing with DPP's HDR tool.

Waterford Visitor's Center, Mohawk River, 8/29/11

This would certainly be suitable for a small print like a postcard. This shot was made at 8:52 AM the day after Irene, about 7 hours and 1 foot before the river's crest.

And, continuing with my ongoing evaluation of the 40mm pancake on a 1.6x crop body, here is one additional shot. This is a three image HDR made with an EOS 50D and the pancake lens on a foggy, cloudy morning last week.

Hudson River looking North from the 112th Street Bridge

I will have more on my smaller, 1.6x body setup in the near future.