This photo was taken back in April during a pretty big rainy spell we had. It was nearing the end as you can see with the clouds breaking a bit in the background. The rain visible up front is what drew my attention to this particular spot. During the winter, this type of scene is not uncommon as we get a lot of rain, and some incredible clouds that often break nearing the sunset hours creating some fantastic drama in the sky. It doesn't always work out like that, and in this case it was one of those times. Still provided some great pictures, but never did quite break enough for my liking.

In order to capture the background, rain and foreground the way I wanted to, I shot a 3 bracket exposure with 2 stops between each capture. I processed this image using NIk HDR Efex Pro2 and Lightroom 4.

I started with some of the presets built into Nik Software and then tweaked the options for a look closer to what I was going for. Started out with the Deep2 preset, and then added some custom control points to adjust the exposure, contrast, saturation in very specific locations. After that I added a little sharpness and noise reduction in Lightroom.