Morningstar Mill Falls

This was my first attempt at combining multiple images with different exposures to approximate a High Dynamic Range (HDR) image. There were a few obstacles, as I didn't have a tripod. For reference, here are the two source images I used:

Exposed for the sky

Exposed for the ground

• First I followed this tutorial that shows how to use Hugin (which I have used for making my panorama photos) to align two images.
• Next I blended the resultant images in GIMP using a technique that uses a greyscale copy of the darker image as a mask.
• Lastly, I flattened the image, scaled it down, boosted the colour saturation of the red and green channels, and did a "smart" sharpening using this technique that sharpens mainly where there are edges, rather than the whole image.

Being my first attempt, I think it came out OK. There is some fringing around the trees because the sky exposed image blurred a bit. Oh well, live and learn!