I should have brought my camera

Carton Avenue, Maynooth, Ireland, 2010

… or should I? Well, yes and no.

Saturday was a beautiful autumn day here on the east coast of Ireland. As Steffi wanted to get some baking and cooking done, I took lil’ Sophie for a walk (well, ride in her buggy). As I came up towards Carton Avenue and this beautiful scene opened up in front of my eyes, I started kicked myself: Why did I not bring my camera?!

Well, I just forgot. And I decided I was too lazy to go back and get it. Instead, I grabbed my phone and tried my best to capture the scene. Of course, you don’t have things like RAW capture on your phone which could have easily dealt with the somewhat larger but not too large dynamic range of the scene. I didn’t have a modern enough phone to have HDR capture right built into the the phone either, nor did I have an app like that installed…

So, I tried to do it manually: I tried to hold the phone steady and took three photos, first focussing (and thus taking the exposure measurement) at the brightest point (the sky), then middle brightness (trees on the left), and lastly in the shadows (bottom right). The resulting bracket of three photos (each roughly one stop apart, judging by the EXIF) was then thrown into my favourite free software: ImageFuser which after some minor fiddling with the parameters produced something close to the above. Some more post-processing in Photoshop (increase saturation and contrast, add vignette) and the result ain’t too bad!

Only thing missing: resolution. I guess I just have to bring a “proper” camera next time…

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