Working from home is nice, in that it takes me a few seconds to get to work in the morning and there is no commute on a busy highway in Austin. But, I do get a bit stir crazy and need to get out. It has also been rainy on and off, so that has put a damper on my hiking ambitions.

Anyway, the sunset was almost nice tonight, but there isn’t a nice view from my front yard. So, I decided I was going to shoot the sunset through a geranium in a hanging basket and try to avoid the chimney of the house across the street.

With the sunset in the background and the flower in the close foreground, I was going to have problems with exposure and focus depth. For the exposure part, I did a multiple exposure HDR merge with some images to correctly expose the sky background and some longer exposure images for the darker flowers. The problem with this plan is the flower moving in the breeze. I was concerned that the de-ghosting wouldn’t be able to deal with the frame to frame motion, but it actually did a pretty good job and I didn’t have to do anything special.

For the fun of it, below is the image without de-ghosting. You can see what a mess it is around the edges of everything.

I decided that the sky being out of focus actually kind of works, so I didn’t try HDR/focus-stacking. That would be a fun exercise.

When the weather gets better, I will go out hiking again as there is plenty of social distancing out there. Until then, this was my photography from home.