Photography Magic

I wanted to show off a couple of the photographs that NavyGuy took on our wilderness adventure yesterday. He has a fairly fancy camera and has been playing around with an editing process called HDR (High Dynamic Range Imaging). HDR is basically a technique that combines the best lit parts of the same photo, to produce a more true to life image. In order to do this, you have to take three photos of the same shot, each with a specific different light exposure (clearly, I'm not a photographer, so I apologize for the less than technical explanation). For instance, here are the original photographs NavyGuy took of a view from Mt. Erie.


You can see in the photos that each looks different; parts of each photo are darker and lighter. Regardless of which picture you look at, none of them show what NavyGuy and I were really seeing as we stood on top of the mountaing - HDR is way to alleviate that. Check out the photograph once the HDR technique has been applied and the best pieces of each photo have been compiled.Awesome, right? (By clicking on the photo, you should be able to open up a larger image.) In this photo, all of the shadows that showed up in the original images have been omitted, and you can see almost exactly what NavyGuy and I saw :) I included two other HDR photos from yesterday as well:
This is a photo of cliffs in Puget Sound. (If the photo hadn't been HDR'ed either the sky or the water would be significantly darker and less clear.)

Here's a view of the forest atop Mt. Erie.

Any votes on which photo we should turn into a large poster for above our bedroom fireplace?