# How (and Why) I Took the Shot #3: Inferno



## TWI by Dustin Abbott (Apr 22, 2014)

Here's a third article from this series that mixes some light tutorials on both capture and post-processing. Hopefully this will help to provide a little inspiration for those of you looking that are looking for it.



Inferno by Thousand Word Images by Dustin Abbott, on Flickr

"..._I arose early on Good Friday morning, took a quick look out the window, and knew that I wouldn’t be going back to bed. You only have so many days with a fabulous dawn. After dressing and preparing my gear in haste, I traveled to a spot where I knew roughly what I would have to work with to enhance the great sky.

This is one of the keys to being a successful landscape photographer – scouting. Amazing skies don’t automatically produce amazing photos. I have seen some shots of fabulous skies that were completely ruined by the entirely uninteresting nature of the foreground.

*Foreground matters.*

This is doubly true if you use a wide angle lens and compose in a portrait orientation as I have done here. My 14mm lens has an incredibly wide angle of view, and composing like this means that the foreground is somewhat exaggerated. That exaggeration produces very visually compelling images…if the photographer does a good job of composing the shot. It also means that some serious thought needs to be put into the foreground and to visualize how the final shot will appear_." 
*to read more, click through here: http://dustinabbott.net/2014/04/how-and-why-i-took-the-shot-3-inferno/*


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## sanj (Apr 22, 2014)

Nice
Thank you!


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## yorgasor (Apr 22, 2014)

I've never thought of manually configuring an HDR shot by adding the photos as layers and using luminosity masks to do the photo. It sounds a lot harder than using Photoshops built in HDR tools. I'm curious what the benefits are to doing it this way.


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## 2n10 (Apr 22, 2014)

Great shot, work and tutorial.


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## TheGreatOwl (Apr 22, 2014)

yorgasor said:


> I've never thought of manually configuring an HDR shot by adding the photos as layers and using luminosity masks to do the photo. It sounds a lot harder than using Photoshops built in HDR tools. I'm curious what the benefits are to doing it this way.



Not only works wonderfully for blending exposures, it works for adjusting curves, levels, saturations in a part that you choose (shadows/hightlights) See the work of various people as http://500px.com/TedGore, http://500px.com/RyanDyar, http://500px.com/TedGore. For me luminosity mask is a silent protest to camera makers to make sensors with more dynamic range.


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## Ripley (Apr 23, 2014)

There appears to be a plastic bottle or bag in the water just above the rock in the center. Regardless of what it is, I would remove it along with a few other articles of debris to clean up the close end of the foreground a bit. Just a suggestion...

Nice shot.


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## wickidwombat (Apr 24, 2014)

yorgasor said:


> I've never thought of manually configuring an HDR shot by adding the photos as layers and using luminosity masks to do the photo. It sounds a lot harder than using Photoshops built in HDR tools. I'm curious what the benefits are to doing it this way.



http://goodlight.us/

here you go all the information you can ever want on this and you can buy his PS actions too for very little money


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