A Disastrous Mistake of a Horrible Image

Nikon D810, 1/80 sec, f/16, 24mm, ISO 250

Okay, so the image is not that bad. The composition itself is rather nice, but the lighting was horrible. The upper left of the scene was in bright, bright sunlight, while the lower right was in dark shadows. The rest of the image was somewhere in between.

My first thought was to capture an HDR image. When I combined the images, there was terrible haloing throughout the image. I tried adjusting the Highlight and Shadow sliders in Lightroom, but the results were less than acceptable. For the image above, I used Lightroom’s HDR button, tweaking settings as best that I could to achieve the image above.

Honestly, the goal of this website is not to show you how to capture great images, but rather to show where you might capture great images. In that sense, this image is a great success.

Wailua Falls: 20.683352° -156.030368°