Now this HDR image would make a great 500 piece puzzle. Imagine trying to work with all that detail. This is another shot from River Park North in Greenville, NC and my last for awhile.  I’ll be heading south for the rest of this week . . . South Tar Greenway in Greenville.  We are blessed with some beautiful natural scenery here and I’m taking advantage of the lush foliage this year.

This image is what I call an “Intimate Landscape.”  I really enjoy those broad vistas but also love the challenge of working in a tighter, natural space like this. It’s composing from a slightly different, more critical perspective that makes this interesting for me.

Processing: This image was produced from nine exposures from -2 to +2 ev at .5 ev spacing. In Nik HDR Efex Pro, I worked with a number of Control Points to selectively maximize Structure, tonal variations and lighting in the leaves.

With Adobe Photoshop, I balanced the colors with Hue/Saturation, added a little more contrast with Curves and used High Pass filter for some moderate sharpening. I added a new layer and painted a dark vignette. And finally used a Photo Filter layer to add more warmth using a Sepia tone overlay.

Equipment used: Nikon D700 with 20-35mm f/3.5-4.5 lens, 35mm, f/4, ISO 400. Manfrotto 190XPROB with 486RC2 ball head.