Photo of the day: Friday 24 July 2009

Tatra Mountain Sunrise, Slovakia

One of my favourite photos from my trip that I have processed so far. This was an incredibly cold morning at only 3 degrees but it was one of the only two days where I had clear skies at sunrise so it was easy to get up. This little lake was only about 200m away from where the hut was located so luckily I didn't have to go far for this shot and had time to get a coffee going before I started shooting.

I shot this scene as part of a HDR sequence and although it was going to be a good photo I assumed that the final HDR would a better image than the single frame original. But after all the processing the HDR just couldn't hold up to the processed single photo because the dynamic range of the scene was perfect with nothing over exposed to the point of clipping. In the processing I applied a half stop ND grad filter over the skies and mountains at the rear and would you believe I pulled down the color vibrancy and saturation just a few points.