On my way back from a short photo excursion to the Sierra Nevada mountains, I stopped at a couple old California gold rush sites, Chinese Camp and Knights Ferry (more a mill than a gold rush site), which are located between Sonora and Oakdale.
All the shots in the gallery are HDR images, each composed of seven exposures and processed via Lightroom 5 and PhotomatixPro. In some of the Chinese Camp shots I’ve “amped up” the HDR to give the buildings more of a feeling of being old and abandoned–which they are.
At Knights Ferry, I’ve tried to use HDR in a more natural fashion to create an image as I remember seeing it in real life. HDR is especially effective with the shots taken inside the Knights Ferry covered bridge since the image more closely resembles what your eyes see in a darkened space. The camera’s limited dynamic range tends to result in over- or under-exposure of single exposure interior shots.
