Antarctic Beech Trees

Antarctic Beech at Springbrook
Originally uploaded by jezza323

Here is another HDR Panorama I took at Springbrook National Park on the weekend. These are Antarctic Beech Trees, which are quite rare, as you will notice if you read the wikipedia article. This shot was taken with the K200D, Pentax SMC DA 18-55 AL II kit lens, and Slik 500DX Pro tripod. It was raining lightly when I took the shot. I setup the tripod just on the inside of the fence which protects the trees from the path.

It was because I was so close that this had to be a panorama. I was not able to fit the base of the trees in the shot. I was also forced to use HDR for this shot due to the extremely bright white clouds behind the tree trunks. I did not want to lose the detail in the roots.

The shoot and processing details are as follows

• Shot in Pentax RAW (PEF)
•  Imported into Lightroom 2.5
•  Exported to 16 bit TIFF
•  Exposures blended using Photomatix Batch Processing with Details Enhancer Tone Mapping
•  Photomatix resulting images were then stitched using Autopano
•  Resulting panorama was imported back into Lightroom 2.5
•  Minor adjustments made in Lightroom
•  Exported to JPG for Web