Weekly Photo Challenge: Light, featuring spider webs

Spoiler alert, the spider webs in this post do not have spiders in them.  So, if spiders creep you out, don’t worry, you can keep reading.  This week’s WordPress photo challenge is about light.  I was walking through a Christmas tree farm this weekend and I saw these webs reflecting the sunlight:

ISO 100 50mm 0ev f/5 1/500

This image here has been processed as an HDR image using Photomatix.  Usually when I am creating an HDR image I have shot my photos using the exposure bracketing feature on my camera.  I did shoot the tree using bracketing, but then I was not happy with my results when I got home.  The bracketing I had used was an exposure of -1, 0, +1.  The +1 exposure was too bright and did not help bringing detail into the merged images.  So, in this case, I took my 0 exposure and created two duplicates of that.  One I changed the exposure to -0.96 and the other to -1.57.  I did this step using Aperture.  From there I put my three versions in Photomatix and used the default settings to create the HDR image.  Then I opened the image in Photoshop, made a levels adjustment and sharpened the image.

As you can tell from the exposure settings that I used, it was really bright out when I took this photo.  So, I did try to cut the light down by using a low ISO and high shutter speed.  I could have cut even more light out by raising the f-stop to a higher number.  This however, would have brought more of the webs in focus and really what I was after here was to have the ones in the foreground be clear but the ones in the background visible but not sharp.

So, what do you think? would you have guessed this is an HDR image if I had not told you? one of my goals in using HDR in this case was to bring out detail but not over process it, how do you think I did?  Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!