Puente Bacunayagua, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

On the highway between the tourist beach enclaves of Veradero and the gritty provincial capital of Matanzas to the east, and about 60 miles from La Habana to the west, sits Puente Bacunayagua. At close to 1,000 feet above the Rio Bacunayagua gorge and 350 feet long, this is the longest and highest bridge in Cuba. The bridge was built as part of the highway construction program heavily subsidized by the Soviets, which came to an abrupt end in 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I took this photo from the terrace outside a small tourist restaurant, bar and souvenir complex on the west bank of the gorge. I was shooting for HDR on a tripod. This image is created from six captures, each capture at 15mm, f/8 and ISO 100. The range of shutter speeds was 1/160 of a second (darkest) to 1/6 of a second (lightest). There was quite a wind, so you can see the motion blur in some of trees.

I fed the RAW captures straight into Photomatix, generated an HDR composite, and fiddled with the tone mapping a bit. I was pleased with how well this came out without having to do individual RAW conversions in advance of running the captures through Photomatix—a nice simplification of my usual workflow.

To get the bus on the bridge with clarity, I composited the highway from the capture with the bus over the Photomatix HDR.