The Blue Hour

This morning started out like most every Sunday morning. I didn’t sleep much as the anticipation of what shots I may get or how the day will unfold always captures my mind. I finally got up about 4 am. Yeah, I know that’s early but it is the time of the day in which I love to go out as I don’t have to worry about much interference.

There is a church down the road from my house, I drive by this church several times a day, but at night or early morning is when it catches my eye. I always think, “I need to take a picture of that, look how beautiful it is.” Finally this morning I stopped, looked at it for a moment, checked my settings so that everything would be just right. For landscape pictures I like to take a bracket shot. What is a bracket shot, you ask? A bracket shot is a series of photos taken consecutively, usually 3,5,7, and even up to 9 photos taken. What this does is help the photographer get the lighting and exposure of all areas of the photo just right.

There are some things to be cautious of when doing bracket photos. Wind, wind causes objects to move which in turns causes ghosting. On things like water it gives a very smooth effect, making it look like glass or a smooth texture.

What a bracket shot does is takes one the is exposed properly, then one underexposed, and one over exposed. This process lightens the dark places and darkens the overly exposed areas. Once taken you will then stack them in lightroom which is much like layering them. Then lightroom will merge them into a HDR photo. The result is usually pretty extraordinary. You can use this process any time of the day. A lot of real estate photographers use this process.

Here is the final result of 5 photos merged into a single photo.

Rock of Zion Grantsboro, NC