The Discovery Bay Reservoir

William J H Leonard has added a photo to the pool:

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This is my newest favourite photo i've created. It is a HDR merge of five photos of the Reservoir at Discovery bay, Hong Kong. This shot was taken at the end of the first day and was shot without a tripod.

I really like the way this has turned out. The day i arrived in Hong Kong was particularly smoggy and you could not see more than a couple of miles. However in the context of this photo it has added to it by creating a haze in the background adding a sense of wildness and mystery to the piece.

The photograph took a particularly long to edit because it is actually a merge of three HDR photos with the Mountains and their relfections from one, the sky and its reflection from another and the fore ground from a third. I did this because although pleased with most of the photograph the sky was too dark and didn't look realistic at all, the same with its reflection which looked too HDR, with a large radius and not the kind i like. The orginal foreground was the same and replaced with a more realistic one. Merging the three was difficult, although the sky involved very little merging it's reflection in the lake was troublesome due to the radius glow of the original underneath, meant that much intricate, low-pixel painting with the brush, rubber and heal tools but i feel it has been worth the effort.

In the mid ground the vibrance was increased to give the haze a blue look and to bring out the greens. The bank's contrast and brightness was also decreased to avoid making it look to HDR-gone-wrong and more realistic.