Taken on the Lamar Street pedestrian bridge in Austin, Texas.

Eaaarly one Saturday morning back in July, I found myself wide awake just before dawn; being on a pretty messed up sleep schedule due to some long hours at work. I took the opportunity to bicycle down Town Lake and catch the sunrise from the Lamar St. bridge. I relaxed for a few minutes after setting everything up, then scrambled like mad over the next 20 minutes or so trying to get all my shots in while the colors were still interesting.

When the last yellow was gone from the sky and the sun was over the horizon I packed everything up, rode back home, and went back to sleep. I didn't so much look at a single picture until November, when I happened upon the set while sifting through my incoming directory. I was pretty excited with the results, and spent the better part of a weekend cleaning them up and assembling a gallery.

I ended up having to go back and do a second (or third) HDR of the first half of the set after learning some things while tweaking values later on in the first pass. It's amazing just how much control you can have over every aspect of the exposure when tone mapping in Photomatix. Even if it's possible to capture the entire tonal range of a scene in a single exposure, running three bracket shots through Photomatix increases the fidelity of the alterations considerably. Even if it's possible to do this sort of thing in photoshop anyway, it's far more efficient (at least for me) to do it in Photomatix, and just do the final color correction/levels/noise reduction/sharpening in photoshop. It's hard to imagine not doing HDRs for landscapes anymore.