Foggy Image & Foggy Thinking

Conditions: Lens EF-S 17-85 mm @ 17 mm (stabilizer off, camera mounted on a tripod), ISO = 100, f/14, manual focus, mirror locked up prior exposure. Three exposures: 0.5, 0.25 and 0.125 sec; combined in one HDR composition; also displayed are 3 non-HDR images.

RAW post-processing: fill light increased, tone curve adjusted, yellow, green and orange color saturation increased slightly

For your viewing - 4 images displayed on the following web-link:

http://flickr.com …on100/271084401​9/sizes/l/

Upper left: Single exposure.
Upper right: HDR composite of three exposures.

Lower left: Single exposure, cropped.
Lower right: Single exposure, cropped & split tone colors added, blue highlights, brown shadows*

I had hoped the HDR composition might reveal additional background detail, compared with the single exposure image.
I could see no difference.

I think the (lower) cropped and/or cropped + colored toned images look better than the
un-cropped photographs.

C & C welcome.

As far as HDR vs. Single Exposure goes: The single exposure easily captures the entire dynamic range of the scene, therefore negating the need to use HDR in order to compress the range. Effectively the HDR software did not see anywhere that the over or under exposed images were necessary so it likely didn't use them. The only tool you got to use by using the technique was the tone mapping, but you managed to use a light touch with that so you wouldn't notice much effect at all.

Great excercise using HDR, but incorrect choice of subject matter to use it on.

HDR is pointless with such a low range of scene values.