Mount Rushmore - HDR

Never been to the Black Hills before, and not being American I really didn't think Rushmore would be all that big a deal... I actually found it to be a very cool place.

This was a happy accident as I was setting up for the lighting later in the evening I took a few bracketed test shots as the sun was going down. Here was the resulting HDR.

Wow! You really got a nice shot of it! Good work!

Nice job! Great composition.

Very nice HDR, love the colors

That's great, well processed.

Very nice hdr work!

My own experience with Mt Rushmore is that being American I really didn't think Rushmore would be all that big a deal... I actually found it to be a very cool place.

From my view, what makes the memorial special isn't that there are american presidents carved into rock, but that the rock formations in the Black Hills are beautiful and that Borglum and son leveraged those unique formations to make their work look like it truly belongs there. I can't imagine those carvings working anywhere else besides the Black Hills. And I can't say that about the nearby it-will-never-get-finished Crazy Horse sculpture, or the Confederate relief in the face of Stone Mountain Georgia. So, for me, the thing that makes Mt Rushmore great isn't the patriotic aspect of the subject matter, but the appropriateness/excell​ence of the art in its perfect setting.

Looks overdone to me.

Numenorean wrote in post #12858578
Looks overdone to me.

Is your monitor calibrated?

beautiful!

Great composition. Which HDR software did you use to process it.

Great photo. That actually looks really good.

Excellent!

irishman wrote in post #12859946
Is your monitor calibrated?

My monitor is fine - just don't care for too much HDR. Mainly it's the sky where I notice it.

Great shot! the place looks fantastic! But the treatment is artificial ....

Numenorean wrote in post #12861466
My monitor is fine - just don't care for too much HDR. Mainly it's the sky where I notice it.

I am not agreeing or disagreeing with the complaint about "too much HDR", but just wanted to use this negative comment to register my only nit about this image: HDR images often exhibit halos around high-contrast areas. In this image there is a halo between the hill/moutain and the sky. With a little bit of manual labor in PS, that area could be carefully selected and processed to eliminate that halo.

That limited degree of additional editing, however, may or may not satisfy those who dislike "too much HDR" because there is more involved with HDR than distracting halo artifacts. The tonality of the sky vs the rock, for example, might be considered as undesirable by some. Personally, I like the tonality of this image. IMO HDR done really well is HDR that isn't over or under-exposed and doesn't exhibit halos. This image is well-exposed, just has a little bit of halo that, in this case, can easily be removed.