Ft Stanton Chapel HDR

Did this today:

Bill, nice old church to photograph. Good exposure, color and detail. Looks like early morning/evening? sunlight giving it a great shadow effect. The bottom of the church is cut off and needs room around the bottom for the eye to take in the entire subject. Cut off like that and sitting on the bottom of the frame causes photo distress. The eye keeps looking for the rest of the building and it's not there. It also looks like there is too much intensity in the application of HDR. There is a white ghost around the building and trees and the effect extends up into the top right corner. That happens often with a plain blue or gray sky. Sometimes you can get rid of it by reducing the HDR intensity and sometimes not. Good subject and well worth shooting again.

Thanks for the comment, shot above some clutter. I shot a couple hundred pics that days and this was the only oe colored that way. I didn't crank it up in my HDR program either.

Yea, been there done that. Some scenes don't lend themselves to be photographed in composition or HDR.

Very cool subject, Bill. I envy both you and Helene, living in such a beautiful area of the country! I have a couple post-processing critiques:

1) The perspective is a little off due to lens distortion. See how everything is pulling towards the center of the image? If you have access to Photoshop, it is easily corrected to some degree.

2) There appears to be some ghosting where the trees meet the sky. A levels adjustment will fix that.

Bill, were you out there yesterday? Libby and I went to shoot the silos yesterday . . . i guess we just missed you.

I actually like the distortion and halo. Shot the same chapel but from the other side, included the rectory and afternoon sun. Had the same trouble with unwanted halos/ghosting. I'm not sure what controls your program has, but the slider (in photoshop) that seems to eliminate that is the 'gamma" and sometimes "radius (glow)" I find myself processing more and more in the photoshop HDR pro because of more control over the effects. Also, photoshop seems to retain the effects better when opening it back in lightroom. I found that with Photomatix, when there's a lot of sky, there seems to be a "glow" shift when exported back into lightroom.

I love this shot, especially the muted tones.

The sunset? is fantastic on the bricks, excellent subject.