It has been tough finding something to shoot lately. I decided to try Brushy Creek park as I often see a barren tree in the water with a lot of white birds perched in it as I am driving past on the bridge. I thought that this would make a nice photo in the late afternoon sun. The birds didn’t show up, so I wandered down the bank of the creek a bit and settled in a spot.
I focused on a tree overhanging the creek with a bird in the water below. I put on my longest lens to try to get in close. The sky was very bright and a bit hazy, so I put on my filter kit with the grad filter to see how that would help. The photo below is shot with the grad filter.
It turns out that it is a bit difficult to use a grad filter on a zoom lens. At 160mm, the transition area of the filter is zoomed in and not as easy to detect and line up on the screen.
I decided to also take some brackets to make an HDR merge without the filter on. So, using the histogram, I took 5 pictures to merge later when I got home. Below is the resulting merged image using Lightroom. I did have a lot of issues with ghosting in the leaves and eventually had to set the ghosting to maximum to get a useable image.
The HDR merge made the sky much more orange. I was able to get sufficient data with the filtered single exposure to make a decent image. With only a single image, there is less chance of ghosting blur between the images as well. It is a bit difficult to use the filter with a zoom lens, but with some experimentation I made it work. So, I think I like the filtered image a bit better.
It wasn’t a very photographic day at the park, but I got to experiment a bit and perhaps learn a thing or two.
Thanks for reading.
Jason Frels 
Good for you … to experiment and compare. Ghosting can be a problem when it’s windy and blowing leaves and grass around. I manually blend exposures and one way to get around this is to process a single RAW frame light, medium and dark then blend whether manual or HDR software.
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I’ve occasionally used the single-RAW-file technique you mentioned, and not only for exposure. I’ve sometimes given more or less clarity, more or less noise control, to some parts of an image than others.
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Local adjustments are the ticket to creating superior results!
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My Photoshop skills are not near as good as my Lightroom skills. I generally mess around with putting graduated filters or brushes on the image in Lightroom if I think I need to. Lately, I have been experimenting with physical filters to accomplish this in camera.
I will often do HDR but a little of this goes a long way.
Thanks for your suggestions and input on this.
Maybe I will see you around the area.
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I like to use this technique as well and I find that I can sometimes rescue photos by blending different exposures from just one RAW file.
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That has the advantage of letting you adjust just the thing you want in each RAW copy, I guess, instead of messing around with filters.
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I usually end up photographing at Brushy Creek Park once a year or so. I like the place, but it can be crowded; I wouldn’t go on a weekend. The trail along the creek runs for several miles in both directions from the park, and I’ve sometimes walked parts of those sections as well.
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I was kind of starved for a place to go shooting and this place is on my way home, so I stopped.
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This afternoon, for the first time ever, we walked a section of the Brushy Creek Trail that runs east from A.W. Grimes Blvd. I got the impression that’s a relatively new part of the trail. Fortunately the wind hadn’t blown down all the colorful fall foliage.
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