When I went to Gruene, I stayed in a bed and breakfast called the Gruene River Inn. The place had a nice great room that overlooked the river and I decided to attempt to shoot it with my 14mm lens and do an HDR merge to capture the room and the windows. One challenge was trying to keep my reflection out of the mirrors in the room, though I think that you can find the edge of one of my legs in a mirror if you look.
With this HDR merge, I just set my camera to take 7 bracketed shots. I ordinarily would have used manual mode and kept changing the shutter speed until I got histograms covering all of the light, but I didn’t want to spend a lot of time here as there were people around.
There is also some distortion at the corners, especially noticeable in the light fixtures. This is just the nature of using this wide lens. I didn’t try to spend a lot of time in Lightroom to try to correct this.
I also had a balcony pointing west and the sunset was spectacular. So, I set up my camera and tripod to get some good sunset photos. Below is an HDR merge of 6 photos showing the fiery horizon just after the sun had set.
This was shot using my 14mm lens to capture as much of the horizon as I could and the textures of the layers of clouds. I did not use bracketing mode for this, but rather I put the camera in full manual and adjusted the shutter by a stop for each shot until I got images from one side of the histogram to the other (about 6 shots).
A bit later, after the sun had set, the clouds began to be lit from below and new smoky patterns emerged. The below image has several wisps of clouds, lit from below with the last pink-orange rays of sun for the day.
This was shot at 30mm as I wanted these lit up clouds to take up as much of the image as possible. Just needed a foreground subject and it would have been perfect.
Well, those were my photos from my weekend in Gruene Texas. It’s a fun place to visit.
I have other posts about HDR shooting in these blogs:
Brenham Fire Department in HDR
Photographing The Texas State Capitol
Picture of the sunset reflected in my Rokinon 14mm lens, taken with an iPhone8.
Jason Frels 
[…] What is second-sunset, anyway? On an evening with high clouds and no low clouds interfering with the sunlight, if you wait 10 – 15 minutes after sunset you may see the high clouds begin to light up in brilliant oranges, reds, and magentas against a deep blue sky. When I saw the scene above, the grayish looking clouds were brilliant orange and in the time it took me to set up and take the picture they had begun to fade to gray. You don’t get much time to capture a second-sunset and it requires patience. I think I did a pretty good job with this when I was in Gruene, Texas. […]
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[…] the sun. I have managed very few exceptional sunsets. The one below was mostly luck, being on a high balcony on a good evening. So, all I can do about this is watch the sky and keep […]
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