Before I blow your minds with this post, let me explain that it's quite likely that nothing will blow your mind.

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My brother, David, flew into Indy two weeks ago - he lives in Seattle. I offered to pick him up from the airport as I was going to be in the area for one of my classes at IUPUI. His flight was due in at 11:00pm on a Wednesday night and I had class from 6:00-9:15pm that night. Class was particularly interesting uneventful and exciting boring that night so I didn't stick around for the second half. Instead, I opted for a 5-10 mile hike around the westside of Indy (White River State Park, Zoo, and Canals) to eat of the time until David's plane landed. I grabbed my D800 and tripod and started walking. It was around 7:30pm. The temp was perfect and there wasn't a cloud to be seen. There were many folks biking, jogging, running, walking, kissing, doing taxes, chasing llamas, etc in the park areas.

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The sun was just starting to touch the horizon. I was taking dozens and dozens of pictures looking for appealing angles and views. That's when a brilliant, possibly game-changing thought came to mind.

"What if I were to take a short video clip of a particular scene and then 'fuze' a beautifully retouched image of that same exact scene into the clip?" I asked myself. 

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I'm talking about a seamless fusion - where the video and image are perfectly aligned. So the rest of the night I did the following at each new scene.

1) Record a 30sec clip at 1080p

2) Without change focal length or anything about the composition, take 7 images to be merged into an HDR.

Ok, I admit. I may have spoke in hyperbolic terms a few lines up, but it is a pretty cool little technique. Check out the video above and let me know what you think. There are 10 'fusions' in the video.

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The bottom line is this, I thought it would be cool to see a scene as recorded by unedited video and then gradually transition to a retouched, HDR (3 of the images are not HDR) version of the scene. It gives one an idea of how a scene can be transformed by post-editing. 

Hope you enjoy! As always, feel free to ask questions.