46/365:  Barn in a State of Decay

Weather was rainy all day, then it began to clear as the sun swept toward the horizon. I hopped in the car and listened to the day's events on NPR as I tried to get myself lost in the country. Before I could get lost, I stopped at a spot I've shot several times before, at night, and in various states of weather. This is a new angle on an old barn.

I may run the risk of shooting only bad weather in the countryside around my area, because of how good it looks in HDR, but I'll try to spice it up too, I promise. Here's the thing. Not even a full week in, and I'm already feeling HDR'ed out. Having to do this type of shooting, or rather, this type of post-processing is both a major time-drain and leaves me feeling unfulfilled to some degree. In my Strobist month, I spent most of the considerable time in the setups and blog posts, but now I'm spending a lot more time in the image processing stage, which is good for practice, but it feels more hollow than nailing the exposure in the camera and tweaking it just a bit afterward. The benefit is that I'm learning more about what kind of photographer I really am, which is important, since I've always wanted to shoot just about EVERYTHING, and have refused to put myself into any sort of genre box. A little direction helps. Also, I'm learning how the HDR process can add to broader topics that I do plan on spending more time with, like landscape photography in general, and also black and white.

Today's shot is all alone, even though I got a few keepers from the drive. I want to save them for another day when I need backups.

Again, I resorted to a blended method of processing. The initial HDR looked good in the lower foreground, but the clouds were moving so fast that the software couldn't reconcile the movement between the frames, even though they were shot within seconds of each other. This one is HDR processed in the lower half, but combined with one of the metered exposures in the top half to capture the clouds without movement.

Ok, one more, what the hell.

-llg