After we left Wind Cave, we visited the Fairy Cave which is about 5 km away.  The fairy cave is a wide area at the internal part of the hill.  We had to climb up a 4 stories concrete staircase to enter the mouth of this cave.  Unlike Wind cave which is long, this cave is wide and tall.

This cave has a balcony where it is a good place to see the scenery and the paddy field near by.  But this is not the entrance for visitors, we entered the cave using the other properly built staircase.

I have prepared to create HDR photos, therefore at each of the angle, I have taken at least 3 photos in different exposure setting.

Do you know what HDR (High Dynamic Range) is?

In a high contrast environment, sometimes if you follow the exposure of the dark arae, the bright area would be too bright (over exposed), if you follow the exposure for bright area, you can’t see the detail in the dark area on a same photo.

HDR photo can be created by using computer software to render and merge photos in different exposure to show good details at higher range of luminance between the lightest and darkest areas of an image.

This cave is a good place for me to practice my HDR skill.

I used a software called picturenaut to merge HDR photos.  I have learn something very important:-  The software has a function to help me to realign the photo if there were any camera shaking.  I used that feature and I thought there would be nothing to align since I use a very stable tripod.  But the status told me that the alignment of y (vertical) is always +/- 1 or more which means there is an out of align of 1 pixel among the pictures even I have used the tripod and bracketing mode on camera.

It must happened when I pressed the shutter release button, next time I will use the camera’s remote control.

Another thing is the outcome might not always looks better than the normal range photo (I still need to have more practice).

HDR photos might not look real sometimes because the range might be higher compared to our eyes’ range.  From what I found, I saw most HDR photos over saturated.  I have done some post-editing to increase the saturation on my HDR Fairy Cave photos as well.  Nowadays there are some cameras which have built-in function to produce HDR photos without having to do it on the computer.  Amazing!!!

To be continued…