North beach is one of the five beaches around our lake. I was out walking the dog early tonight and took these pictures around 6:15pm just as the sun was going down. By the time we’d walked back to the house it was practically dark.

I don’t usually go for High Dynamic Range (HDR) too much. It’s too easily overdone. In this case though I didn’t really have much choice. The foreground was in fairly deep shade and even though the sun was going down the background was comparatively bright. I wasn’t going to be able to get them both exposed properly. So I thought I’d try out the RX100’s HDR capabilities. I don’t usually shoot .jpg either, preferring RAW but in this case again I had no alternative as the RX100’s HDR mode does not support RAW.

For those unfamiliar with HDR Imaging Resource describes it as follow in it’s review of the RX100:

The Sony RX100 HDR mode takes three images in rapid succession, one nominally exposed , one underexposed, and one overexposed, then combines them into one high dynamic range JPEG automatically. Lighter areas from the underexposed image are combined in-camera with darker areas from the overexposed image to produce an image with increased dynamic range. The overlaid images are micro-aligned by the camera, but it can only correct for so much movement. If it can’t micro-align successfully, an icon indicating HDR capture failed will appear. For best results, the subject should be static or there could be “ghost” images, though the RX100 seems to do a good job at avoiding them. There is also a manual mode where you can select 1 EV (“weak”) to 6 EV (“strong”) difference in exposures…the effect can be quite subtle with no difference between some of the settings, however the Auto setting did a pretty good job at boosting shadows, reducing highlights, while still retaining enough contrast.

I used the manual mode and tried a variety of settings. On reviewing the pictures I preferred this one (unfortunately I don’t recall which manual setting this was – other than that it was one of the lower ones).

All things considered I’m pleased with the result. It doesn’t look too over-processed – I hope.