HDR Photography - My First attempt on - Lepakshi monolitic Nagalinga

HDR is not a greatest art to master until you know what it is.

There are a number of sites that could help you learn HDR. In simple steps, you just get an HDR generated by an image taken with more than one exposure, Darker, medium tone, and lighter. You could use a stitching tool to Stitch them together into a single photo, or use Adobe Photoshop to generate HDR or Use Windows Live Photo Gallery to Fuse the Photo, or use very high-end software for creating HDR. I used wiki to understand it.

You could find minute differences with how each software works and gets you the pics. but you would have to choose the best one to put up on your album.

I was inspired by the below picture of the Lepakshi Sculpture:

This was a HDR, you could see the best lighting against all the locations. I took my Bike to a ride to Sri Virabhadra Temple, Lepakshi (Karnataka-Andhra Pradesh border) from Bangalore. It was a decent ride with my cousin Balaji. We shared the ride in order to ensure that we do not get tired.

Reaching there I first found the below sign board that let me take many photos at the temple without paying for my own photography.

I, first used the stitch method to get the below images converted to Stitched HDR:

 

This gave me the image Stitched Image: 

Monolitic Nagalinga - Stitched Image 

The Main Images were next Fused with the below Images:

The Fused Image was generated using Windows Live Photo Gallery Editor Console:

Monolitic Nagalinga Fused

Finally I used Adobe Photoshop to generate the HDR with all the Original images that included the below one as well.

HDR Result is:

Lepakshi monolitic Nagalinga HDR

Ah.. Please note, the Light on the serpent head is not from any additional effects. That was the natural light source for the Mother Earth, it was the SUN who helped me a lot in getting these photos, and posts on the blog.

I remember, this is my second post that I have typed for long time. My vocabulary is not too good. I rarely post as well. but hope this is something that could help out people in their photographic skills as well.

Further if you are in India, or you'll be in India. Please visit Lepakshi, this Structure is said to be built by one great Sculptor, who had nothing to do while his beloved mother was preparing food from him. He thought Idle mind is Devil's workshop, so the Sculptor carved this marvelous stone serpent with Siva-linga in the middle. His mother was astonished at the ability of her son and exclaimed against this. Alas! the was a crack created in the Snake's body. We could even today recognize that there was a crack on the body of the Snake on this statue if carefully observed (they have been patched up by cement like material).

This was a story I heard from my beloved Grand Mother. There is an inscription (mostly in Telugu if I had observed that properly) along one of the sides of the Prakaram of the temple, this was not exactly read by me, possibly that would have mentioned the actual story. 

Find Lepakshi on Google Maps here.