Last night I decided to have another attempt at the Avoca beach sunrise photos I tried for just after Christmas. Again the forecast was mostly fine so I got everything organised and woke up at 4:45am.

It turned out that there was extensive cloud cover and the sunrise was nowhere to be seen. I decided to go ahead anyway and capture a few images. Due to the cloud cover I focussed on shooting some long exposure shots of the waves and rocks and decided to produce my first published HDR (High Dynamic Range) images.

I have experimented with HDR a very limited amount before so producing this kind of image is fairly new to me. I initially used the Photoshop CS3 Merge to HDR tool with the photomatix plugin for photoshop. I was unimpressed with the results of this approach so instead I moved to using the stand-alone photomatix software which yielded much more pleasing results.

Using the photomatix software is reasonably simple and only involved a few steps. Firstly, you select the images to generate the HDR image. Next, the tone mapping must be performed. In this step you can determine the final look of your image by using the Details Enhancer method or the Tone Compressor method. I'd recommend saving the HDR image before performing any tone mapping as this means you can try multiple variations to find which suits you best.

Today I've released 2 new images: "Ocean Mist" and "North Avoca Beach". As usual these images are available to members first so head to the gallery and login or create an account if you don't yet have one.

Finally, I'd love to hear your thoughts on these 2 new images so please leave comments on this site or on redbubble.