Sunset over Somerset

My brother and I took a very nice hike in the hills above northwest Reno.  As we were walking back to my car, we walked along the golf cart path through the Somerset golf course.  It was at that wonderful twilight hour with all of the wonderful color in the sky yet dark enough that the house lights were turned on. 

This was a great setting for a high dynamic range (HDR) photo.  It needed the shadows brought out as well as the highlights.  For this shot, I took three sets of exposure bracketed shots.  My camera only takes a series of five bracketed shots.  I wanted to experiment with a larger bracket, so I bracketed three sets.  After we got home I experimented merging all of the sets, then just some of them, then finally only three exposures using HDR Efex.  While HDR Efex has some good presets, I almost always choose the "default" or the "balanced" preset, and modify it accordingly.  For this photo, I did reduce the tone conversion quite a bit, and also increased the contrast by about 10%.  Once I had the photo in Photoshop, I opened it in Camera Raw, then made a few adjustments to the  white/shadow balance, and reduced the saturation a bit.  I then flattened the image, and tried loading it here.  For the very first time in all of my 530+ photos, the photo was rejected because of size.  I scaled the photo down to what you see here, which was finally accepted.

It was really great fun hiking with my brother tonight. We have had a very restful and enjoyable holiday season with him and my mother.  They will be driving back to Oregon tomorrow.  It will be sad to see them go.  I miss them already.  And it means that we are back to the "grind" tomorrow.  Onward and upward . . .

Thank you all so much for all of your wonderful comments, stars and hearts on my last few blips.  I have been trying to comment on your wonderful photos, but time has been limited.  So, I have been giving out stars and hearts.  

I hope you all had a great weekend, and are looking forward to the coming week. 

Enjoy the holiday season!!