Dark Subjects light background

This is one combination that will confuse digital cameras. More precisely confuse their light meters. A very dark subject against a light background, usually results with a silhouette. These statues are on the foreshore in Nelson, (New Zealand) and there was a bushfire raging nearby, so there was a drama in sky sky due to smoke. Yet neither the statues or the richness in the sky are capture when the camera chooses the best exposure.

 

Perhaps this is an ideal situation for some HDRi help out. I took a set of three bracketed shots 1.5 EV apart. The under-exposed image (-1.5 EV) shows the sky, but no details in the statues. Whereas the overexposed image (+1.5 EV) captures the detail in the statues, but the sky is washed out. I then used picturenaut to combine the tones across a broader range and with a bit of adjustment in the tone mapping set I was able to get a reasonable result, but not exciting or as dynamic as i hoped.

  

The best solution was to come back later, as the sunset, flood lights came on lighting the statues, but the drama in the sky had subsided a lot.