Winter Refreshment

I was hoping for a little color this morning as I was exploring the back roads north of Idaho Falls in search of an interesting foreground. I could see the sky brighten but the foreground remained fairly dark even as the sun rose because of the low clouds in the east. I elected to shoot 9 exposures at one EV intervals to assure that I covered the entire range of tones. This is the 0 EV image...



When I looked at the set I could see that 9 images -4 to +4 EV was overkill for this scene. I threw out the -4 EV and the +4 EV images and used the 7 images from -3 to +3 (shown below) for the HDR which was then processed using Photomatix Pro 4.01 to yield the final image. One final processing step was to remove the footsteps in the snow using the patch tool in Photoshop CS5.