Location: Dawn behind Scarborough Castle, North Yorkshire @ 4:10am. It was quite windy as you can see from the patterns in the water, so I weighted the tripod with the camera bag.

This image was captured using a tripod-mounted Canon 5DmkII with a 24~70mm F/2.8 L lens set at 57mm. I auto focused on the rock and heather and set the switch to manual focus. The camera was set to manual exposure mode, f/11, ISO 100, and daylight white balance. I then captured a series of 10 exposures from 4 seconds all the way to 1/125th of a second in one-stop increments. The RAW processing, creating and saving the HDRI was all done in Photoshop CS/4. The HDRI was then opened and tone mapped in Photomatix Pro before the final clean-up and image correction/enhancement work was done back in Photoshop.

I did not like the original HDRI sky because the clouds had moved and created bright colors and strong marks. I opened the 1/8 of a second exposure out of the sequence and adjusted the RAW Converter settings until the sky looked good then opened the image. This image of the sky was then dragged and overlaid on the HDRI with a layer mask and a grad to define the split between the images.

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