Hyperfocal Design
This is another older HDRI sky shot at f3.5. As a test, I developed the NEFs with -2 exposure per bracket in order to try and get more dynamic range. However, I’ve since been informed that changing exposure like this doesn’t exactly achieve much, and results in a slight loss of data. I know that for LightRoom 4, Christian Bloch from HDRLabs suggests developing using -1 exposure and -40 contrast to “linearize” each bracket, however for LightRoom5 there is a specific linear setting… So I’ll continue to read into the subtleties and report back.
This is also the first sky that features some really dramatic lighting changes as the sun is occasionally blocked by clouds.
We do lose a small amount of dynamic range for the first second or so of footage, as the sun is getting clipped, but soon after the sun dips down and loses enough strength that we manage to get the full range. From the animation I’m not sure you could tell at all. So while this is probably not a technique I can use for day time skies, if I’m doing a sunset to twilight/night time lapse, it is certainly worth doing. This was shot at ISO 100 as well, so if I shoot at ISO 50 I can grab another stop out of this setup.
Cloud shadows?
Watching this footage makes me think I should try and line up some kind of shadow ‘cookie’ (if my terminology is right) to try and simulate clouds moving over the landscape. Maybe there’s a way to do this by using the EXRs themselves? Maybe somehow setup some nodes in Blender where we set the sky to grey scale, and then project it or set it as a cookie. I have no idea how this would be done!
Samples coming soon
I’m pretty sure, unless a tester points out some flaw in this workflow/HDRI footage, I’ll offer this as the free sample, as it shows off an interesting sky with some big lighting changes. These EXR frames are ever so slowly uploading to my testers now, so perhaps by next week I’ll be able to offer 5 seconds or so at 4096 resolution. Hopefully my Amazon hosting account doesn’t get too crushed, as the file sizes are fairly large!
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