Weeky commented photo #23 - Rural landscape, mountains and clouds

Rural landscape before dusk in Haute Savoie

I'm still working on the serie about The rural landscapes around my home.
This image was done about one month ago. I was making photos of some rural fields in the light of the end of afternoon when i noticed these beautiful clouds formation over the mountains in the far background.

Scenes with such a dynamic range are not easy to capture :

• You can use some GND filters to balance highlights in the sky and foreground shadows
• You can make several shots of the scene with different exposures and then blend them digitally (using HDR method or not)

The day was a little wendy and i felt a little too lazy for multiple exposures.
So i mounted a 1.2 soft GND filter in front of my lens and could capture a raw file where highlights and shadows were both respected.

No information was lost but the raw file was difficult to process to obtain a nice photo. After many tries with curves tweaks, manual masking, etc i developped my raw files with three different exposure ajustments.
Then i used Picturenaut to produce and tonemap an hdr file.
The result was then saved as a 48 bits TIFF file that just needed some minor adjustments do give the photo you can see here.

I like to name things by their real names and for me such a worflow is not HDR Photography. There is no magic and whatever the algorithm you choose to process a single file, it can't give you more information that what is included into this single file.
If i would have shot the scene without the GND filter i would have exposed it to protect the sky for clipping and then the foreground would have been really underexposed. Then using any method to retrive informations in the shadows would have revealed more noise than image details.