Desert Landscape

This was taken out in the desert (surprisingly enough). I didn't have a lot of time to set this one up as I was holding people up. Unfortunately there wasn't a huge amount of foreground interest, unless you count fag packets and plastic bottles, so I tried to do something with the ripples and the reeds. I originally wanted to have a black and white version but I think the colour one just edged it. This was taken at ISO400 (I had a polariser on) f8, 1/100 at 16mm.

HDR in Dubai

I used to do a fair bit of HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography but now I tend to just use an ND grad to balance the sky. This is not so easy when you have lots of sky scrapers dissecting the horizon, plus setting up the filter can be a little bit annoying.

This was taken using my 16-35 lens at 19mm, I focused on the horizon and then set it to manual focus, the camera was in full manual mode at f11 ISO100. The only thing I changed was the shutter speed. I used to just bracket 2 stops either side and join the 3 raw files but now I take up to 9 exposures as I think it gives a far better result.
The speeds for this one was 1/15,1/30,1/60,1/125,1/250,1/500,1/1000 and 1/2000 so a stop difference every time (1 stop is half or double the light) or if you aren't great at judging stops, if your camera works in 1/3 stop increments, each stop is a 3 clicks on either the dial or the wheel.

First of Dubai

I'm just posting the first few coming off the card from a recent trip to Dubai, if there is anywhere to practice architectural photography this is it, converging verticals everywhere! I'll hopefully be posting some more of our trip in a few days. These were taken near the marina before the sunrise, a long exposure of about 20 seconds served to really flatten the water and get the mirrored effect.
Obviously I needed the tripod but nothing much else to it, the exif data on these ones was ISO100, 16mm f/8 for 20seconds. I was a bit slack processing them, using noise ninja when not needed etc. So I might redo them at a later date.