D810, 600/4E, TC-14E, EFL 840mm, f8, 5 frames at 3 stop intervals from 1/4000 to 1 second, ISO 64, substantial processing

Of all of the possible shots I was trying for, this one was my number one priority:  to capture the full dynamic range from the “dark side of the moon” to the delicate extended corona.  Thankfully, some of the recent Nikons offer a five frame, three stop per frame bracket option.  That’s what I used for this.  For this sequence, the exposures were 1/4000, 1/500, 1/60, 1/8, and 1.0 second.  The 1/4000 image turned out to be unnecessary since the 1/500 did not have any blown out highlights, so I discarded it.  Then I took the remaining four images into HDR Efex Pro and Aurora HDR Pro and neither of them could handle the very slight alignment needed to stack them properly.  Then I tried Photomatix Pro 5.1.3a, which handled the alignment fine, but there were three very obvious transitions in the corona instead of the smooth gradation I wanted.  That was caused by the very large (3-stop) gaps between the exposures.  So, I leveraged the excellent dynamic range in the D810’s RAW files and created -1 and +1 “exposures” from the two middle frames, a +1 from the first used frame, and a -1 from the last frame.  That gave me 10 frames, one stop apart to feed into Photomatix.  Whenever you “create” intermediate frames and input them into Photomatix, it realizes there are multiple frames that have the same EXIF exposure information and asks you to tell it what’s going on.  You can edit the exposure information for each exposure to help it to know where to put each exposure in the stack.  This time it produced a much smoother corona.  I picked the preset that best brought out the extended corona, but needed to tweak a few things to get it exactly where I wanted it.  The most important tweak was that you could see the detail on the “dark side of the moon” too well for my taste.  So I pulled that back some, so there’s just a hint of detail there.  And I had to pull the corona close to the sun down some to keep it from blowing out.  I was pretty pleased with the image at that point, though I may fiddle with it when I have time later.