On the Road Again

On my recent travels through northern Michigan (ok, the northern parts of the lower peninsula), I took a few pictures out the car window. (Ok, a few hundred pictures out the car window.) (Ok, almost a thousand pictures through the car window.) I had my Sony NEX-7 set to Speed Priority mode, where the camera basically locks in the autofocus for the first shot, and then fires a series of shots afterward set to the same focus setting.

Why would I do such a crazy thing -- as shooting nearly a thousand pictures from a fast moving vehicle?

Number one, it was a little chilly outside. Temps were sitting somewhere roughly ten degrees below freezing (in the 20s Fahrenheit). I'm not really a fan of the whole idea of taking my camera out into the cold (I'm slightly skeptical of the whole "throw your cold camera into a sealed plastic bag in order to prevent moisture from getting inside the camera" trick; does it really work???)

Number two, since I was on my way to the airport, ready to head back home, I didn't really have time to stop and take pictures of every scene where I would have liked to have stopped and taken pictures.

I realize that shooting through a car window is somewhat like shooting through a really dirty filter, but... sometimes you take the shots that you can get. I figured that shooting pictures this way would be better than nothing, and it would give me something to play around with in the photo editing software.

Don't worry, I wasn't driving. (Safety first, kids!)

For this picture, I edited my RAW image -- creating one that was bumped up two on the brightness of the exposure value and another that was bumped two down. I then merged them all together in Photomatix 5, and then moved the resulting image over into Corel Aftershot Pro to crop the image, make a few tweaks, and voila!

At some point, I'd like to run a test to see whether I am actually better off creating the extra RAW images (in the above fashion; I use Image Data Converter) that I afterward merge together to create an HDR, or whether I am simply better off running a single RAW file through Photomatix to create my pseudo-HDR.