For those of you who have attended a special event at Disney's Hollywood Studios like Star Wars Weekend or maybe an ESPN Weekend, you know about the area past Rock 'n' Roller Coaster and to the side of the Tower of Terror. ; I had only been back there during the day previously. ; Last weekend, I attended the Villain's Bash Party in conjunction with the inaugural running of the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror 10 Miler by runDisney. This gave me an opportunity to bring in my tripod and do some shooting for a couple of hours before my daughter, who ran in the race, crossed the finish line. First, I want to show you what I considered the best one shot exposure. ; I'll put the Exif data below. Nikon D700/28/300VR (w/VR Off), 13s, f/16, ISO 200, EV 0, 40mm FL, tripod From that setting I bracketed around it 8 more exposures in one stop intervals (1/2s, 1s, 2s, 4s, 8s, 25s, 60s, 120s). ; The last two are approximate as I was using my iPhone's stop watch app to close the shutter. ; I processed the nine photos in the Photomatix Pro 4 Plugin for Aperture. ; I applied a favorite preset, adjusted to my liking and finished processing in Aperture. The final looks is a bit more HDR-ish than I was looking for. You can see how the shadowed areas were opened up and the combined exposures caught light changing over the time it took to take the photos which was done manually. I have been struggling with night time HDR images for awhile now. ; Still a work in progress. ; ; Any suggestions or comments appreciated.
Hey Ive got a medal that looks kind of like that! ; ; Cool colors! I don't spend a lot of time at DHS at night (except for when Osborne lights are up) so it was cool to be there and see it all lit up. I even liked the logo they projected onto the building.
That's a pretty cool angle. ; I don't have much experience in HDR since I prefer my shots to be more realistic. ; If you're just trying to get more detail in the shadows, try stacking the images on separate layers in Photoshop and then use layer masks to allow the details in the shadows to show through from the overexposed shot(s). ; The trick with that approach is to set the opacity of the brush to 25-50% and slowly build up the mask so you can feather the edges into the main shot. ;
Hey, I just got PhotoShop. ; ;D ; I will give this a try though as that sounds like a useful technique. I use HDR to capture the full range of light using the image histograms as a guide. ; I don't mind what I got as the lighting they were using for the party was far different than what is normally on the Tower. ;
Thanks, Katie! ; Sorry I missed you over the weekend. ; My family kept me occupied. ; I did see you and some of the flickr guys in the Magic Kingdom but then I got pulled to Big Thunder by my girls. ; They were not humoring me at all that day. ; : ;D
Scott, did I see you briefly at Lou's meet on Saturday afternoon? I didn't stay long it was SO hot and I had to get back and rest a while before race time
