Driving north along the Serchio, from Lucca to Bagni di Lucca, one passes one of my favorite bridges. The Ponte della Maddalena has stood at Borgo a Mozzano for over 900 years. If the water is still, the refection of the bridge, with its semi-circular arches, is spectacular.
The water was very still on 7 June 2015, as I was driving north at 8:30 PM, The sun was behind hills to the west, and the sunlit clouds were reflecting in the water. I hit the brakes and pulled into the parking area south of the bridge. Grabbing my camera I snapped a picture of the bridge, The image was disappointing, the clouds were washed out, and the bridge lost in shadows. Luckily, I had been playing around with High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography and had programmed to my Nikon D300 to take a rapid five shot bracketing sequence with full stop steps (exposure value = 0,-2,-1,+1.+2). I increased the ISO to 1250 as I did not have a tripod with me, and shot with the widest angle my zoom offered, 18mm or an equivalent full frame 35 mm of ~28 mm.
I combined the five photos using easyHDR. This program has automatic alignment correction for a shift, tilt, and perspective change. Alignment correction is essential for handheld shots like mine. Also, it provides 24 presets for combining the images and manual controls. I used the preset “dynamic-bright,” The resultant image is much closers to my mind’s eye than any of the individual exposures. When we look, our eyes adjust for the brightness changes as we scan the scene. Then the brain integrates the components.
I then used Photoshop to sharpen the image and remove ugly culture features such as high tension wires, power/telephone poles, and wiring. The final photo is below.
A few suggestions:
Although I think easyHDR is a great program, I made my choice over three years ago. There may be a new king of HDR. The Wikipedia HDR entry provides a list of software.
Be sure to set your camera to Aperture Priority when bracketing the exposure to maintain a constant depth of field, I did not, but got away with it because my 18 mm focal length had a depth of field of 18ft to infinity.
Doug's Paws 
Beautiful!
A strong piece on respect for place and hints on how to work with images. Your opening lines are poetic as you honor the history and awesome beauty of the scene: someday (probably sooner than later) we will have cameras that see what the eye see,: image, contrast, reflection and “authentic” lighting along with the emotions we experience. Thanks for a great start to the day
Don, thanks for your comments. I always enjoy feedback.
Doug
I love this picture and totally respect the knowledge of photography you put into to it to achive these amazing results. Ben fatto Doug
Thank you for your comments, Doug
Doug, Beautiful image and great description of the technical steps that you used to create it. After years of depending on my iPhone’s hardware and software to create images for me, I have been getting back into photography using the Sony A6000 I bought this spring. I thought I’d start using Photoshop, but did not like the investment required by the subscription model they’ve gone to. Researched a few alternatives and settled on Affinity Photo. One-time purchase, full featured, and a large set of tutorial videos. Based on what I saw in one of the tutorials, I think that you could do the kind of multi-image HDR blending you describe using Affinity. –Bruce
Bruce, I will look into Affinity. Thanks. Doug
Here’s a page in the Affinity Photo documentation on how to use the “stack” feature to merge multiple exposures:
https://affinity.help/photo/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=/Stacking/stacks_exposuremerge.html?title=Exposure%20merging%20using%20stacks