Week 20 - Saturday 12 May 2012.... HDR?? or No HDR???

Dawn at Dusk...

This photograph has been uploaded to this blog before but I wasn't entirely happy with it - I plugged it into a High Dynamic rage programme (Photomatix Pro 4.0)  and below you see the results:

Photo No.1 is the original Raw file exposed at F11 @ 1/6 sec. I used my Pentax K10D and my  Sigma AF 8-16mm f/4.5-5.6 DC HSM (DX) to grab this super wide shot of a little fishing boat at Greencastle, Co.Down. the original photograph has it charms - I love the colour of the sky and the soft delicate nature of the pink clouds on the left hand side of the picture. The boat however appears to be under exposed (even after a touch of fill light in Lightroom) 

Dawn at Dusk F11@1/6Sec 

Nice but I thought there was more detail in the photograph!! I loaded three photographs into Photomatix the first obviously being the image above (F11@1/6 Sec) the other two were shot using multi-exposure on the camera at +1Stop and -1Stop (F11@ 1Sec and F11@ 1/20Sec)

I used the painterly settings which usually creates an absolutely horrible mess of a picture but today I tweaked the settings significantly to create the image below: the sky has lost some of the subtly and has a harsh highlight just to the left of the boat but the foreground has improved significantly showing the flowers plants and smaller green boat which was all but absent from the earlier photograph....

Dawn at Dusk F11@1/6Sec (HDR- 3 photo image)

As with all HDR work I feel like I've cheated a little bit :-0 and I still prefer the sky in the original image - but this comparision shows there are benefits to be had by pulling the detail from images either side of the 'ideal exposure'

Interested in your comments/preferences