HDR Photographs taken from Idaho Highway 78, Owhyee County, departing Murphy, ID, driving towards Grandview, ID. August, 2013.
"Desert Landscape"
This HDR image was taken with a polarizer, facing NNW. Notice the color fall-off in the sky, to the left (West). This is typical of a polarizer when facing directly East or West. Especially when using a wide-angle lens, there is almost always a color-fall-off on one edge or the other. Additionally auto-focus cameras use circular polarizers, which are not as effective as traditional filters.
In the distance is the Snake River canyon. Click the image for a larger view.
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"Fence Posts"
Two miles East, along the same highway, facing South. The Owhyee Mountains are in the distance. The dirt road you see is a ranch service road, and is not the highway. This is a 5-exposure HDR, taken with a wide-angle, which captured the foreground fence post and the background's vanishing point:
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Here are the five exposures used to assemble the HDR.
The final HDR image is similar to the EV-0 exposure - this was a well-lit scene, with high contrasts, so it is no surprise the grey-card-metered EV-0 picture was close to the proper exposure.
These were taken mid-afternoon, with the sun directly overhead. This is not the best time to take a photograph. It was a fun challenge to see if the images could be saved.
HDR took some of the contrast out of the picture, filled-in harsh shadows, and gave some color to the washed-out sky. The corner vignettes are caused by the polarizer filter stacked on top of a UV filter, and is pronounced because of the wide-angle lens. I did not notice this while taking the pictures. These were cropped out of the final HDR.
Owhyee County
For those of you not familiar with Idaho, the Southern half of the State is dry, high-desert, with sage and cheat-grass. Owhyee County is a large, particularly desolate area, with 7,700 square miles, and a population of 11,000 souls. The county was named for 3 Hawaiian trappers, who in 1819, traveled in this region and disappeared. The anglicized name stuck. The famed Silver City ghost town can be found about 30 miles SW of Murphy, on an unimproved road.
Along the Snake River, within pumping distance, you will find alfalfa, some grains, and dry-desert cattle grazing. Google-maps shows how important the Snake River is to the local economy. The red-x is approximately where the photographs were taken and the town of Grandview (population 440) is marked at the "A".
Related Imageliner links:
Jump Creek, Idaho
The Pillars of Rome, Oregon
Frank Church Wilderness, Idaho
Stanley, Idaho Forest Burn
Bruneau Hotsprings and Resort, Idaho
