HDR: Cows Walking at Sunrise

Watching cows walk back after milking, I was lucky enough for one caramel tan cow to sit down in the middle of the track causing the other cows to slow down behind her. A couple of other cows joined her. It was foggy and this happened 10 minutes before the sun rose above the horizon. The horizon is the Coromandel and Kaimai Ranges so the sun appears a little later than the forecast sunrise. The sun rose shortly before the cows started moving again.

Bracketing 4 steps of 1EV above and below the indicated exposure ( which was changing as the sun rose ) I kept taking sets of bracketed exposures. I have set the lens button on the Z mount lens to open the new folder menu. Creating a new folder saves a lot of processing time. Any sets that exclude the sun above the horizon can be quickly discarded. I used a tripod as unlike the later experiment into an HDR portrait the capture speeds were between 1/125 and 2 seconds.

Once I select the preferred folder set in Lightroom I stack them for tidiness and then photo merge in Lightroom. The cows were stationary, the gap between each exposure was relatively short and the de-ghosting feature in Lightroom eliminated other obvious issues.

The photograph would not have been possible if HDR was not used.

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