Wyoming Rainbow, HDR, Wind River CanyonHDR Landscape Photograph of a Rare Rainbow in the Wind River Canyon.

     HDR or High Dynamic Range photography has been around for some time, but is only now seen widely by the general public.  It usually requires multiple exposures that are stacked in expensive software to create better than real photographs.  Many photographers sell expensive landscapes from around the world using HDR.  The biggest drawback is the use of multiple exposures means your subject cannot be moving at all, so what you photograph is limited.

     Then along came some brilliant code writer that wondered if the "HDR look" could be done with one exposure instead of five!  I'd heard of single picture HDR but nothing more till recently.  I received some "free" Canon software that had HDR built right in, so off I went last week and worked my arthritic hands to pain.  The one picture that I had to work on was my wife's favorite of the Wind River Canyon.  It took a couple of hours to get it exactly right, but here it is in this week's blog....Deb's Rainbow.  

     In sixteen years we've never seen these trees show off these colors, because usually Wyoming Fall just knocks off the leaves all at once.  Bang....gone, but this one Fall....wow!  High Dynamic Range gave this picture some real attention grabbing power now; as a Shoshoni friend said yesterday, "It's like the curtains were opened up."  I toned down the saturation a little so the trees would look wonderful and not comic book, and I cloned out some posts that only posed visual problems.  Now here's the only rainbow you can ever see in the beautiful Wind River Canyon.  

     These trees were photographed with a Canon 7D and a long lens, hand held of course.  Until next week, keep your camera ready.