I just had brain surgery a week and a half a go.  Seriously…….  Modern medicine is a wonderful thing.  Eight days later it was time to get out the house and go test my new Nikon Nikkor 24 pc tilt shift lens.  I decided at the last minute I was going to do a sunset shot but then waited too long to go to my first choice of location.  So, I decided instead I was going to go shoot the Midland Animal Clinic in Poway where we take our pets to.  This is a fairly new building that I’d been wanting to shoot and this was the perfect excuse.  I knew that the success to making a good image was to take advantage of the lens, using it’s perspective controls to keep the lines on the building straight.  I then did several exposures as the dusk turned into the evening and from those multiple files selected four files to work with.  I used Photomatix to create a HDR image and then carefully layer in one of the original files to pull out the signage in the highlights.

Just a quick word about working with HDR tonemapping in Photomatix.  There are no sound formulas or great starting points that will give you a great image with the automatic settings.  It’s really a starting point to creating a good image and the more you experiment with it the more you will understand it’s controls, allowing for more creativity in the image making process.  HDR won’t work on everything.  Part of successfully integrating it into your work is to use it as a tool to enhance your vision, not create it.