Sunlight In The Ravine Of 'The Forty', Grimsby - Hybrid HDR

(Click on the image for a larger view)

One of my 'Go To' places for photography is right here in Grimsby - the ravine down which the creek named 'The Forty' cascades from the waterfalls at the top of the Niagara Escarpment, down through the downtown and North to the shore of Lake Ontario some 1.5 km (1 mile) downstream. It is on my 'Go To' list because it is a short walk from the house and is right in the core of Grimsby,

The ravine is fairly narrow and deep, winter sunlight only enters it at a suitable angle for a short time in the afternoon. Any earlier or later and the angle is too low to illuminate the creek-bed. In this image, the large slabs of dolostone that have fallen into the bed of the creek as it has eroded the ravine out of the face of the Niagara Escarpment. and a recent cold temperatures coupled with a nice snowfall, have frozen the creek and blanketed the area in white, creating this classic scene.

I have been here often and will continue to wander here. - JW

The image is a hybrid HDR (High Dynamic Range) image, i.e. made of a combination of an HDR image and elements of the conventional images used to create the HDR. This has been done to clean up any artifacts of the HDR (and associated tone-mapping) process.

The original three images used to make the HDR were taken using a Nikon D5000, tripod mounted, with an 55-200mm VR lense set to 102mm, f/6.3, ISO200.+/-2EV auto bracket with a EV+1/3 bias (to compensate for the brightness of the snow and keep it white). The three images were processed using Luminance/Qtpfsgui using the setup information embedded in the file name and as detailed below. Then, in GIMP, the base HDR image as well as the 3 source images were set up as layers. The base HDR was combined with the EV+0 image using 40% transparency to form the working image. After that elements of the other layers were selectively combined by using a soft edge eraser to integrate areas impacted by HDR/tone mapping artifacts and to improve detail in some locations. Some tonal adjustment was then performed using curves, saturation was increased to compensate for the relatively flat output from the Mantiuk operator in the tone-mapping stage, sharpening, add border and scale to 1024 wide for posting here.

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DSC_3336_forty01v01multlayadjx1024_pregamma_1_mantiuk_contrast_mapping_0.1_saturation_factor_1.2_detail_factor_6
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Qtpfsgui 1.9.3 tonemapping parameters:
Operator: Mantiuk
Parameters:
Contrast Mapping factor: 0.1
Saturation Factor: 1.2
Detail Factor: 6
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PreGamma: 1

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