Snowdrops at Sunrise

Sometimes it's good to walk out of the house to take a picture; these snowdrops are at my village church. Careful positioning was required to frame the church between two gravestones, whilst also having a bold clump of flowers in the foreground. The rising sun is filtered by distant trees, enabling me to include it even as it backlights the snowdrops.

Our eyes can take in a brightness range around one million times (20 stops) to see detail throughout a scene like this. A camera cannot match this performance, with a maximum of around 14 stops. To capture detail in both the bright sun and shaded church I made five exposures at different shutter speeds (1/250s, 1/60s, 1/15s, 1/4s and one second), giving an extra eight stops in total. These five frames were then merged in Lightroom (Photo - Photo Merge - HDR) to create a high dynamic range (HDR) image with detail throughout.

A further technical limitation was depth of field. Even using a wide angle lens and the aperture stopped down to f/16, with the nearest snowdrops just a few centimeters away it was not possible to get everything in focus. To overcome this I repeated each exposure at four points of focus and then combined them using specialist software (Helicon Focus) to build an image which is sharp from front to back.  

Hence a total of 20 RAW files (five exposures at four points of focus) went into compiling this photograph.  That way the camera has been able to capture what my eyes could see.