I drove to Yosemite in the morning for a Moonbow photography seminar of the lower falls, the disappointment grew as I got closer to Yosemite Park and discovered a thick layer of clouds. Until now I never was keen on shooting with overcast skies as you end up with either overblown sky highlights, or a too dark landscape. This time though I had my tripod handy which made it a perfect opportunity to experiment with HDR processing.

HDR processing combines several pictures taken at different exposures to bring out details in both highlights and shadows areas, a tripod is a must. Some cameras have auto-bracketing options.

Settings on a D90:

First, set the bracketing as desired via the BKT button located on the front left side of the camera, now would probably be a good time to take a look at your D90′s manual, I usually set it to 3F 2.0 which corresponds to 3 pictures at -2EV, 0EV, +2EV. We also want to automate the capture to prevent camera shake and delay between pictures, to do so set the D90 to take 3 pictures in the Timer menu. Finally, set the camera to use the timer, press the shutter, and once the time is up the D90 will automatically take 3 pictures at the exposures you selected.

Note: if you are shooting RAW and don’t have a tripod you can get away taking a single picture and generating JPEGs at different exposures through your favorite RAW editing software (Photoshop, Nikon Capture, etc…). While it is convenient the shadow areas can exhibit a hefty amount of noise, therefore a tripod will still produce better results.

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