When it comes to God beams, I don’t know of any location that produces them more consistently at sunrise then the Black Hills & Badlands in SD. This morning was no exception. There are two major challenges in my mind when taking good God beam photographs, exposure and foreground. Without control on those two key elements, all you have IMHO is mud.
These days, the exposure is pretty darn simple. Yeap, HDR and these are 5 image captures, shot handheld on the fly. HDR makes it pretty simple to capture the large exposure range with the subtleties in between. While Photomatixs did the heavy lifting in the finishing, the true finishing was done in PS. It makes all the difference in the world! But while I have the exposure, I don’t have the foreground so these images are just OK at best in my book. Better can be made. Knowing the Black Hills, I knew exactly where I wanted to speed to get the right foreground. Stay Tuned…..
Photos captured by D3x, 24-120VR on Lexar UDMA digital film