God Rays

How many times have you seen those wonderful rays of sunlight piercing the clouds, smog, fog, atmosphere?? And how many times have you wished you had captured them on film or digitally? 
I've tried a number of times, and thank goodness, they will come back because I don't have it right yet!

Sunday morning Murph and I were tooling down the freeway and here they were, in a tremendous amount of glory. So I pulled over to the side of the freeway and took a series of bracketed pictures (in between the semi's going by). Then I used the HDR (high dynamic range) feature of Photoshop CS5 for one shot and HDR EFX Pro from Nik software for another, just to compare as well as experience what the versatility of each tool is.  I'm by no means an expert at this!

The first picture is what it looks like if I just used Lightroom to attempt to pull out the rays. The second one is EFX and the third is CS5.  The EFX has the u-point technology that allows you to select a point (or points) within the photo and make a whole range of changes as desired to it without affecting the rest of the photo.  I liked that for lightening the flag and building as it seemed to be easier to do than in CS5 or LR3.

None of these really represent what I feel I saw and experienced that day, so I guess I'll just keep on working - ain't life great?!