Windmill and Double Rainbow in HDR

This summer, after a thunderstorm had passed overhead, I noticed a double rainbow out my window. After taking a few shots, my wife got home and said, "You've got to see the rainbow at our neighbor's house." So I grabbed my camera and drove down.

It was such a nice setup with the bright double rainbow, seemingly coming down right at their house. The sun was shining in the foreground and there was a dark sky behind to highlight the entire scene.

I only got a single exposure of this so a true HDR image was not possible. So I made a virtual copy in Lightroom, exported the two images to Photomatix Pro, and separated them with 4 ev (that's a function of Photomatix). After the Photomatix processing, I imported the results back in to Lightroom. There I cooled the color temp. a little to get the sky a little bluer, and with a few more tweaks of color and sharpening, ended up with this.

You can see a part of the result of the HDR processing in the halo around the windmill. This can happen when an image is sort of "overprocessed" in Photomatix and is not always desirable. However, in this case, I did it on purpose just because I liked the extra contrast around the windmill blades.

Prints of this image are available at My Zenfolio:
mikehendren.zenfolio.com/

You can see my Photo Blog at:
http://thrumikesviewfinder.com/