Big Steps

@JoeB: Happy new year to you as well.

@Amir: Thank you, but this one is actually not an HDR image. I made global level, contrast, and brightness changes only, using Photoshop Elements and the shadow/highlights function. Looking over some of the HDR groups on Flickr lately has sort of shamed me where it comes to some of my more highly processed HDR shots. I also had some shots removed from JPG Magazine in which I was accused of overdoing the HDR. So, I'm attempting to be more subtle. Firstly, I'm re-evaluating which images are the most appropriate for HDR and which ones can be processed using standard processing commands --like this one. Secondly, when using HDR, I'm looking for some of the cues they look for in the Flickr HDR groups, like halo-ing and contrast suppression, and backing off on the processing to exclude these kinds of results.