An aesthetic evening at Punggol beach

Picture Info:

I haven't taken a landscape photo for quite some time already. So, here I go once again to the punggol beach with some of my friends. It was my second time visiting there... ^^. It was also a beautiful evening, although the weather's a bit cloudy.

All these times, I've been only taking normal landscape shots. So, for a change this time, I decided to try making a complete HDR. The acronym HDR comes from the words High Dynamic Range. In a photo, dynamic range means the difference between the lightest and the darkest color value. In other words, dynamic range means the contrast of a photo. HDR photo is basically a photo which has larger dynamic range than an ordinary photo. You can find more about making HDR here. HDR has always been of interest to me ever since I started shooting photographs. Yet, it requires your editing skills for it to become a mind-blowing Tour de Force. Below is my first stepping stone to HDR photography :D. The picture is not of a good standard but this is what I've tried, and I'm posting this to share with my readers and my fellow photographers.

Please click on the picture to enlarge! ^^

Settings Used:

No of shots taken: 3 [-2EV,0EV,+2EV]

Picture Format: RAW

Aperture: f/9

Focal Length: 18mm

ISO: 100

Place: Punggol Beach, Singapore

Postprocessing:

- The three shots were merged using Photomatix Pro and the resulting picture tonemapped.

- Adjusted temperature, tint, and clarity in Adobe Lightroom 2.

- Stacked back with the overexposed picture [+2EV] to get some details of the rock

- Stacked back with the normally exposed picture [0EV] to recover the blown-out parts of the sky.

- Added an unsharped mask by a small amount to sharpen the image.

Comments and Criticisms are warmly welcomed and appreciated! ^^