Would love opinions - is it too much?

Just took this earlier today, first time trying an HDR image. Not sure what to think of it to be honest, so would like to hear others thoughts .
It's 11 images put together, cropped and adjusted levels. Is it too unrealistic looking? Too boring, weird.. etc.?

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …/54317866@N06/8​197528431/

Where's the image?

It's back . I think I should have posted in the Critique Section..

This image is pretty abstract and, by all intuitive measures, probably has little to do with HDR. The image content is difficult to judge in terms of my ability to estimate what the luminance range of the scene might have been and whether the image benefitted from, or is befitting of HDR workflow.

HDR aside, from an aesthetic point of view, it's not doing much for me. I'm not sure what you were going for, but the crop is really close, and the image is missing a focus. The orange area in the bottom left corner is more of a distraction than a desirable element that does something for the composition.

I'd be interested to know what your intent was here and why you think the image benefitted from an 11 exposure HDR workflow. The full size image on Flickr has what appears to be a very noticeable amount of JPEG compression artifact and appears very soft.

kirk

Thanks for your input, kirkt . The reason I did the 11 exposures was because I had to turn in an HDR image for class and I've had zero experience with it so far, so I just gave it a try.. I realized this is probably not a great one to turn in, so I spent most of the day yesterday trying to find a better location - one that suits hdr a bit better (your comment definitely helped me there!). What I liked about it was the blue with all the lines in it, I cropped it a square and left the orange in it because I thought it might need that little element on the bottom.

Give this experiment a try:

Find an indoor setting with a window to a bright outdoor scene. Set the camera to manual mode and a reasonable ISO and aperture (for example, ISO 400, f/5.6) - meter the highlights (outdoor scene - use your spot meter mode on your camera) and note the shutter speed that exposes them properly. Then meter the shadows (indoor scene) and note that shutter speed reading that gives you a proper exposure. These are your bookends for the bracket. Try shooting from the slowest shutter speed, in 1 stop increments, to the highest shutter speed. For example, say the outside scene meters 1/2000 sec and the indoor scene meters 1 sec. Shoot:

1s, 0.5s, 1/4s, 1/8, 1/15, 1/30, 1/60, 1/125, 1/250, 1/500, 1/1000, 1/2000

by manually changing the shutter speed to the next exposure. This is the fully manual way, don;t worry about trying to set up exposure bracketing or something automagical at this point. It will be beneficial to do this while the camera is locked down on a tripod. Touch the camera and shutter release very lightly and use the 2 second timer so that the image will be exposed after any camera motion from your touching the camera has died down. Shooting in 1 EV increments may be a little excessive, but you can always use fewer images and will have plenty of data from which to make your merge.

Once you have acquired these images (in raw) you can review them and perform your merge, etc. You may want to try starting with every other image (i.e., 2 stops between each image) and see if your results are satisfactory. The quality of the merge and alignment will depend, in part, upon the application you use and how familiar you are with it. If you do not have a dedicated HDR application, try Picturenaut:

http://www.hdrlabs.com​/picturenaut/index.htm​l

it is free and very capable. You may also consider free trials of other HDR applications (most have them) and see what works for you.

This suggestion is not to create some masterpiece, but to challenge yourself with a scene that inherently contains a high dynamic range of scene luminance. Shooting a scene that does not really possess an expansive range of scene brightness (i.e., a scene that you can capture in a single, well exposed raw file) is less of a challenge and does not often demonstrate some of the basic tonal range compression lessons that are critical to HDR imaging.

Give it a shot. Here are some tips and tricks from HDRLabs as well:

http://www.hdrlabs.com​/tutorials/index.html

to help you think about the acquisition, merge and toning process.

Have fun!

kirk

Here are some examples of this exercise that I have done and found helpful when testing different techniques, applications, workflow, etc.

Thanks for the write-up and the instructions , it makes a bit more sense to me now when hdr is good to use and when it doesn't make much sense.. It seems fun though so I will try it out some more for sure!