Barrington Tops National Park - HDR and Panoramas

With no birds around we had ample time for all kinds of other photography, including the challenge of trying to capture the beauty of the vistas that are associated with a mountainous environment. HDR does a good job at that! Some time back I used a bit of blog space to describing the process of using HDR and Tone Mapping to capture the details in the bright as well as in the dark parts of a photo, it all got a bit confusing. A few photos are worth many words: Above is a HDR + tone mapped photo combined from 5 raw images and below is a single jpg shot of the same view.

The jpg is doing a fair job at trying to preserve details in the dark front of the photo, but at the cost of badly overexposing the sky in the distance. In the HDR image details are contributed from all 5 photos allowing good resolutions in the dark as well as the bright parts. I might actually prefer the horizontal version of the view.

I also managed to shoot a few panoramas. Autostitch still works a treat and as long as the old CPU does not have too much to chew on and that I do not ask for too high a resolution it spits out panos as fast as I can generate blog posts to put them in. :-)

There is obviously the possibility of combining HDR and stitching - making tone mapped panoramas! - That will have to be another day, but there is absolutely nothing difficult about it, just a matter of shooting a hold flock of raw images and then remember what goes where. :-)

All good! Great escape to Barrington Tops National Park. We entered the park from the western side, but decided to leave going east. It is safe to say that we saw more birds during the ca. 40 min drive out of the park than we had seen during the 3 days up on the plateau. The eastern part also called Gloucester Tops National Park seemed very much alive and vibrant and I could be convinced to go there for a long weekend at some stage if someone is up for a bit of camping and an attempt at seeing a scrub-bird.