Fall 2015 - Walking Bridge

After a week of not seeing the sun - what a beautiful Saturday!  Spent most of the day walking the local parks, looking at leaves and playing with camera settings.
One of the parks has a walking bridge over the Flint River.  This is a tough place to shoot, lots of shadows and physically tough angles.  And it is a popular place, lots of traffic.
But once you get there, the payoff can be good.
Here is the original raw image:

And the histogram:

1/40   f/9
Aperture Priority
ISO 200
Polarizer Filter
Focal Length 24mm
Focal Length (35 mm) 36 mm

Overall the lighting is about where I like it - nothing blown out on the lights or darks.  I used a polarizer filter because as a general rule anytime I'm around water I use it.  The polarizer also really brings out the blues of the sky.  Being that it is a fall season photo, the tree colors are the wild west as to what can be done.

The bridge is the tough part - really dark.  I know the colors are there, just have to get them.  To get the detail and light of the bridge, I used Elements raw editor.  I created two additional images with an EV of +2 and +4.  These are the images:

+2:

+4:

In the +4 image, there is really good detail in the bridge.  I took the original image, plus these two and pushed them through my HDR software.  (My plan B was to use the +4, but I do like the detail the HDR processing does and in this case it worked.)

This is what I pulled from the HDR software.:

I don't really care about any of the other objects or colors - bridge only.  I will use this as my first visible layer and place the image with all the other objects processed the way I like then over top if this image.  And I removed the bridge.

And when all the processing is completed - This is it.

All in all it works well for me.  Still a bit on the dark side, but that was the environment in the trees.Good walk for the day - and a good memory.