Hakone Gardens in Saratoga, California, near San Jose, is a lovely place to visit any time of year. A week ago autumn colors were fading, but not gone. Looking east in mid-afternoon part of the garden was in full sun and part in the shade of a hill. The widely varying light suggest combing multiple exposures to make a high dynamic range image. The time I used the the Photomerge™ Exposure feature of Adobe Photoshop Elements™ 8.

Markleeville is the seat of Alpine County, a geographically large area having only about 1500 residents. The residents get to enjoy some of that eastern Sierra scenery. Markleeville is a small town (pop. 197) about 50 miles southeast of Lake Tahoe. Route 89 continues south of the town, ultimately turning east through Monitor Pass.

Roughly six miles south of Markleeville, the road crosses over the Carson River, providing an accessible photogenic view. The 4 PM late September sun provided contrasty lighting, just the thing for my recently recovered interest in high dynamic range imagery (HDRI). I took three frames, bracketed 1 1/2 stops around the nominal exposure, then added some extreme contrast enhancement to the foreground.

We are fast approaching autumn, and with it many enjoyable walks in the woodlands with a camera at the ready. This past weekend we visited Pfieffer Big Sur State Park on the central California coast. It provided a warm up for autumn photography. One feature of forest scenes is the high range of light to dark tones. That prompted me to brush up on high dynamic range imagery (HDRI), a technique for combining multiple exposures into a single image.

We should be able to plug in the camera to a computer and use a software package designed to make the setup process easy, with help keys and online access to the manual and general reference materials. For example, setting up exposure bracketing on a Nikon D100 does not actually require a soldering iron, but it might be easier if it did. Instead, one might have the camera attached to a computer, access “bracketing” from a menu, and then be led through the process step by step.