Inspired by late November sunshine over a holiday weekend, I took the Canon S100 to a popular photographers’ perch of the Seattle skyline with the hopes of capturing a golden sunset. Alas, the sky turned gray as I set up the tripod, so I grabbed the opportunity to give the S100 a workout with the different special effects and HDR capability. A little ‘getting-to-know-you’ session, so to speak, and we had a great time.

Capture with the built-in HDR capability. Captures JPG only, not RAW. Notice the ghosting of the cars. I'm unlikely to use this effect much, as I get better results shooting RAW and handle HDR with post-processing.

Single image HDR: capture via RAW, converted to TIF, processed with Photomatix.

Captured with built in nostalgic effect

Captured with built-in fish-eye effect. Could be useful in different situations.

Captured with built-in minature effect. I like this a lot, good for amplifying objects in the middle of a shot.

Captured with built-in toy camera effect. Interesting, seems like something that could be reproducible with post-processing.

Captured with built-in super vivid effect. Another one that seems like something that could be reproducible with post-processing.

Captured with built-in color accent effect. Handy to have in the right circumstances.

Captured with RAW, converted to TIF, grunge effect by Photomatix. My favorite of this series.

After shooting the Blue Angels in a mid-afternoon light for so many years, I thought I would try something a little different: I camped in front of Boeing Field to view of take-off and landing, and processed my favorite pix with Photomatix in single shot mode.

Blue Angels in formation

Blue Angels with HDR processing

For comparison, below is the same shot as above converted to JPEG from Lightroom using LR’s built-in editing. (Adjustments made: slight boosts in exposure, blacks, sat, sharpening, and noise reduction.)

Blue Angels with standard processing

Of course, this could also be a testament to my post-processing LR skills, which I’m always looking to build up.

More Blue Angel shots, including some favorites over the past few years, are up in this gallery.

I just became a HDR convert. Holy cow. Let’s see what you think…

BEFORE

Mountain range east of Mt St Helens - single RAW capture. Colors are flat, and there is little depth to the picture.

AFTER

Mountain range east of Mt St Helens - after HDR post processing with Photomatix and Photoshop. Notice the colors and overall vibrancy.

What a difference using a single RAW capture. Higher fidelity and more even exposure is typically achieved with 3-5 RAW shots spanning across exposure settings like (+2, +1, 0, -1, -2) or (+2, 0 , -2). Multiple exposure execution would have taken care of the blown highlights in the clouds, which were too far gone to compensate in Photomatix or Photoshop. Very impressive processing.

Photomatix is now on my recommend list.