Goodnight Prairie

Kissimmee Prairie Preserve Photo

The sun sets over Kissimmee Prairie Preserve.  This sunset had so many different looks as it unfolded ; I wish I had setup to shoot a timelapse, but I wasn’t in that mind set that night.

This is a six image HDR blended together in Photomatix using the merge to 32-bit hdr plugin.  The plugin brings the image back into Lightroom and gives you a range of light from +10 to -10 stops to play with.  One advantage of the plugin is the final image is rendered in Lightroom so you tend to avoid (or are not tempted to create) the CGI HDR look some images can have.

Kissimmee Prairie Preserve, by the way, is a 54,000 acre panther release area a couple of hours outside of Orlando.  It’s home to gators, birds, panthers, and deer – not to mention a slew of other species.  It’s also home to one of the darkest night skies in all of Florida.  I have a photo or two of the Milky Way I’ll be posting in the next week or so.