When I flew up to the northeast to attend the NY Bear Mountain and NH Fall Foliage meets, I went with my friend Chris since he lives in NH.  He was the driver for all the moving photos in those galleries, so  unfortunately, his car didn’t make it into any of those pics.  So I did a little HDR photoshoot for his car instead.

For those not in the know, HDR stands for High Dynamic Range.   Since a camera’s sensor doesn’t have the dynamic range that our eyes do, very bright and/or very dark parts of a scene go beyond the sensor’s range and are lost.  HDR attempts to produce a dynamic range closer to what we see.  This is accomplished by taking multiple images.  The minimum is to take three images.  One image exposing the brightest part of the scene (usually the sky).  Next is the darkest part of the scene, the shadows.  Finally, an exposure in the middle is taken.  These are merged in a photo editing program, and then corrected for final exposure and color.  You might have seen some images with wild colors done in the same way being called HDR, but the original intent was to create as realistic an image as possible.  Of course, I like to process my images a bit beyond that.  ;)

These were the last HDRs I made with my D90.  I’ve done HDRs before, but not on this level.  The great dynamic range of the D90, its low noise, and color accuracy allowed me to produce the best HDRs I’ve ever made.

The first set was a back road near West Point, NY.

The second set was from one of the roads at Bear Mountain.

Thanks for the ride, Chris!