Wow, it’s good to be processing photos again!  I especially enjoy the HDR processing, and while we were in Houston I was able to get a few good brackets to bring back to the computer.  For most of them, I was using the tripod and shooting nine exposures (that’s one of the things I love about the Nikon D700, it allows a LOT of bracketing!).  But there were a few where I just shot hand-held exposures of five brackets.  I haven’t processed any of the latter yet, but I’m hoping that Photomatix will be able to align them without too much of a problem since there are a lot of straight line, architectural features in the shots.

So…here are a couple of images that I’ve processed so far.

This first one is the Museum of Fine Arts, which just happened to be hosting an exhibit of Picasso’s work, thus the banners on the front of the building.  The grounds were beautiful with the spring flowers in full bloom, and the partly cloudy skies gave plenty of shadows and light to enhance the HDR effect:

This next one is St. Luke’s Paul’s Methodist Church, located nearby the museum and medical center. I probably should have pulled out my really wide angle lens for this one, but I don’t think it came out too badly. I love all the detail in the facade of the building. It was a breezy day, so there’s a little bit of ghosting in the tree limbs that I wasn’t able to totally remove in Photomatix, but I don’t think it’s too distracting at all:

There are more images to come, so stay tuned! It’s good to be back!