CCC Scenic Overlook at Devil's Den State Park

Over Friday evening and Saturday morning I, together with my art director/stylist/photographer's assistant/wife, shot about a thousand frames in Fayetteville, Arkansas and at Devil's Den State Park. I've been in contact with a major national magazine that needs images of the park, and I needed the same shots for my Arkansas image archive anyway. The park was on my "to do" list since I haven't shot there in a few years. I plan to go back in October when the fal leaves are in peak color was well. It's really an awesome place then.

The overlook shown below at Devil's Den was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps back in the thirties and overlooks the Lee Creek Valley of Devil's Den State Park:



Here I'm going to give an example of blending exposures from multiple shots to achieve the desired final result. It would be impossible in this scenario to capture the exposure properly from the areas inside the structure to the outside landscape and rising sun within a single exposure. Cameras simply don't have that wide of a dynamic range. For the human eye though, it's a piece of cake. Your eye's iris opens and closes and you look from inside to outside and back and forth and you never even notice it.

So with my camera on my tripod I took 5 frames at f/22 with my wide-angle zoom lens set at 12mm. The exposures ranged from 1/10 of a second to 1.6 seconds. It makes you appreciate the power of the human eye doesn't it?

Starting with the image thumbnails in Adobe Lightroom, I selected all five images and launched the LR/Enfuse plugin to blend the exposure together. This is not normally the technique called "HDR", or high dynamic range, but it is a version of HDR and method of achieving a higher dynamic range. Enfuse is just blending the exposures, something I could do manually myself in Photoshop with layers. I still do blend exposures manually on occasion, but generally though, Enfuse saves time.

After Enfuse outputs a TIFF with the blended file, it looks kind of bland. I opened the over-exposed frame as a layer within the image and used it to paint in areas that needed more light and brighter highlights. While Enfuse will lighten the dark areas, the light areas will get darker. In some places you don't want that.

The resulting image is below:

CCC Scenic Overlook overlooking Lee Creek Valley in Devil's Den State Park, Arkansas built with native stones and logs.

All images are Copyright Terry Smith, 2009. All Rights Reserved.