Night time HDR

Each time I've come home down Great South Road I've been taken with the sight of the Telstra Clear Pacific Centre and the way it's illuminated.  Tonight I decided to take a tripod and a few shots to see if you think it's as impressive a sight as I think it is.  5 shots, in the order of 20 seconds each, combined in Photomatix to give the effect you see here.  The dots in the sky are stars.

I took a few other shots, not all of them HDR.  The next shot is also a 5 shot HDR image, tajen from a slightly different angle and without any cropping.

The third is just a long exposure of the new junction at Manukau.  I've always liked the streaks from the car headlights in photographs.  Problem tonight was there was hardly anyone about!  I had to watch for the cars to come and set the exposure to 30 seconds to be sure I'd get a few vehicles in the shot.  I suppose that's the problem with living in New Zealand ... there's hardly anybody here ;-)

The last shot was just a bit of fun with the multiple exposure setting on the camera.  I wasn't sure what would happen, but it's not too bad for a first attempt.  Perhaps let me know what you think of the shots in this post?

Flash for fun

25 second exposure, no flash, only illumination is from the house lights.

I quite like the effect the lights in the planter and above the front door give at nighttime, but have often thought I could do something to get a better image.  The first shot in this post was taken with camera on tripod with ISO at 200, a 25 second exposure and aperture at f11.  In no way does this give the effect I see when I come home as the trees to the right are more illuminated ... in this first image they're just a black blob!

A friend from work had mentioned using flash, so, with an energetic son we tried firing the flash at the trees to get a different effect.  We didn't want it to look like daylight, bit we did want more detail in the trees and other parts of the front yard.  Hmm.  Well, perhaps not quite so much as you can pick out in the second shot.  Here you can see I need to tidy up the leaves and other junk that's accumulated after mulching etc.

25 second exposure again, but this time with additional speedlight flashes aimed at the trees and the house.

So which do you prefer?  Haha ... perhaps neither!  What it did do was expend much of that spare energy my son had as a result of him running up and down the driveway firing the flash at the trees.

Interesting for me is that my son doesn't appear in a ny of the shots, yet he was all over the driveway firing the flash at the trees.  You may recall Louis Daguerre's photograph taken in 1838 of a very busy street.  You'd never know it was busy from the photograph as the exposure was so long that moving people didn't have time to register on the image.  Well, all apart from the shoe cleaner and his customer.  So, with a 25 second exposure and an active son it's hardly surprising he doesn't appear on the image.

Click on the images to see them a little larger and perhaps let me know what you think ... and which you prefer.

HDR ... again

I can take lots of pictures with different exposures, but the combining of them to get a picture with a high dynamic range is becoming more of a challenge than I thought it would be. qtpfsgui isn't as easy to use as I'd hoped and the results I'm getting from it are less than impressive.

I regularly pass the Otahuhu power station near the Highbrook interchange on the Southern Motorway and it looks like an ideal candidate for a night shot with HDR. A clear night, spotlights illuminating the facility and smoke and steam rising into the night sky; it looks quite good! There's a couple of shots that demonstrate my inability to get a good effect here and here. Please, if you have any hints make a comment and help me out.