Shell Creek Canyon at Sunrise

This is a shot I probably should have walked away from. This is easy morning with the sun rising on the right. The dynamic range of this shot was something I would have used TriX 4x5 sheet film with N-2 exposure and some sort of water bath development to capture. The DR well exceeded the 14 bit ADC on my Leica Q2 M. However, nothing ventured - nothing gained and we were out of our way out of the Bighorns moving on the Jackson Hole. So I set the camera up for a 5 shot exposure bracket of 5. That is -2 to 2 exposure compensation at 1 stop intervals. I did not know how the camera would handle a hand held bracket. While I knew that Capture One had a HDR merge capability - I didn't know how well it would work on a hand held case.

I stabled myself, quieted my breathing and on an exhale counted to two and fired - just like one would shoot a firearm. When I did the merge of the five shots I was quite amazed at how well the composition turned out and how easy it was to edit the resulting raw. So I learned something about my camera and C1 that day.

I like the shot! I agree with Alan about the lower right side though. While it looks significantly better when looking at the bigger file, it still lacks contrast in my opinion.

That being said I'm pretty sure the problem could well be rooted in our different screens though...

To me personally this looks slightly better on both (my calibrated higher quality, as well as my cheap standard screen):

Your image is excellent either way and the composition very effective! Great that you were able to use HDR with handheld captures.

Alan and Simplejoy, thanks for commenting. This image seems to look better in higher resolution. I was under the impression that we had a 4 MB
limit so I did down sample to post. At higher resolutions there is more detail obvious in the shadows. As to the bottom right corner. Yea, I played with that. I was leaning out on a platform probably 50 feet or so above the water. The shadows were very deep on the bottom right and the rocks were in bright sun across to canyon (on the left of side). I guess I was looking at the bottom right and the water getting lighter as it progressed down the canyon as a form of "leading lines."

I'll go back and play with it some more. However, between Leica's exposure bracketing implementation on the Q2 and Capture One's merging S/W I was quite pleased I could even get this. I also was quite pleased I could hold the camera steady enough long enough to pull it off. HDR is not right for every image but the DR here was well beyond the capability of any FF or APSC sensor camera that it was the only way. I expect a medium format camera would have worked better here but even then it probably would needed a 3 shot exposure bracket. However, 3 shots is better that 5.