I didn’t take a lot of time to shoot photos while camping as I was mainly hanging out with family. But we were camping in a nice place and I managed to shoot a few pictures. The place that we were camping is on some family owned land North of Edna Texas. This land has been in the family a long time and mainly leased to cattle grazing these days. There is a camping area near a stock pond where we set up tents and have a camp fire. I have taken my daughters camping down at this place several times over the years, so it’s kind of a tradition.

There is a gap in the trees looking toward the camping area. The setting sun was peaking though the trees so I thought that this might make a nice photo if I could get the sun to sparkle a bit in the lens.

Didn’t quite get the perfect sparkle that I wanted but I think that the picture tells a story with the camping tent through the trees.

A little after sunset, there were a few clouds in the sky and the wind was calm so I tried to take a few blue hour pictures. The image below is an HDR merge. I liked the way the oak trees with the Spanish moss were hanging in front of the pond and the clouds were reflecting in the water.

This was just a basic Lightroom HDR merge as I was primarily interested in increasing the dynamic range of the image. I think that the problem is that the pier really doesn’t read that well being so far off to the side of the image. So, I moved over to the left a bit to get more of the pier and the overhanging tree branches.

With the below series of bracketed photos, I have processed them two ways. The first image is a basic Lightroom photo merge and the second is merged with Photomatix Pro, which provides a lot of controls for the merge.

With the Photomatix Pro merge I got a much warmer sky, which I like, and I got a bit more range out of the tree branches and leaves. I am always worried that my HDR merges will come out looking over-baked and fake. I am going for something close to what the eye sees, but that is not always easy to judge on a computer screen. Let me know what you think in the comments.

I think that I captured a good composition with the old mossy oak tree branch stretching across the scene and the pier leading out into the water with the colorful post-sunset sky in the background. Not bad for 10-15 minutes of work.

After this I put the camera away, and enjoyed the campfire with family. I hope you had a nice holiday as well. Thanks for reading.