Castle Hill

I braved the cold today and went up to Castle Hill near Huddersfield. The day had been very crisp and clear but there wasn't enough cloud to get a really good sunset. I tried some side lit shots but I had little success, in hindsight I should have found a vantage point a mile or so away so I could incorporate the hill and the sunset, maybe next time. I had to resort to a HDR shot to get some detail in the dark side of the tower. I also had to correct the converging verticals in photoshop.

You guessed it, a tree...at sunrise!

Hey folks, I wasn't in the best frame of mind for photos this morning so it became more like a what not to do on a photo outing and if you can still come away with something half way decent you are doing ok. (Remember, it's what not to do, and I did them all!)

1. Set off with no plan of what you intend to shoot.
2. Take the bare minimum in terms of equipment, filters and polarisers just take up space and you won't need them.
3. Leave yourself no time to get to where you wish to take photos.
4. Walk the least distance possible but through bogs that only 50,000 horse power tractors can get through, if possible wear brand new Italian motorcycle boots, oh and clean jeans!
5. Don't worry about checking what ISO you were using last time, it'll probably be a nice noise free 100 anyway.
6. Take a haphazard, almost child like approach to crossing muddy puddles, with equipment depreciation these days you can always just get a brand new camera should it come off the tripod as you skip over the half lit puddles.
7. Spend no time thinking about composition, you'll just over complicate things, is a straight horizon really that important?

This is the result, I'm amazed I managed to remember to take the lens cap off! I got away with being a little lax this time because I was familiar with the surroundings and the equipment. The timing of the shot is critical, shots 10 minutes either side of this one would be moved to deleted pretty much as soon as I got them on the computer. For anyone still following this was a HDR so the shutter varied from 5 secs to about 1/25. ISO was 100 (I do check this without thinking now, despite the above point 5) Keeping ISO's low is extra important when doing HDR stuff, f/16 and 16mm.

I'm adding another shot to this post as I think I prefer it to the HDR look, I'll probably change my mind back as soon as I post it!

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.

Weddings

Hi Everyone. Seems like ages since my last post, I've been a bit busy with wedditing (Weddings followed by editing) I could do with getting up to the lakes, the weather has been really changeable but it makes for some great landscapes, as long as you don't get soaked to the skin! Anyway this was from a recent wedding, I decided to do a little HDR on the dress with a black and white conversion which I thought looked quite cool. I used Dynamic Photo for the HDR and then CS3 for the BW conversion. I really liked the sky in the mono conversion.

More of Snowdonia

Another shot from the same walk as yesterdays post. This one was taken from bristly ridge during our ascent of Glyder Fach but looking back at Tryfan. I didn't use a grad for this shot or a tripod but I did have a polariser on so I had to up the ISO a little and open up the aperture more than usual to compensate for the darkening from the CPL. The exif data was ISO250 f/11, 16mm, 1/125 sec. I originally tweaked it in lightroom and then CS3 but I did another version using dynamic photo which I preferred. If you use Dynamic photo you know a lot of it is experimenting with the sliders and it can be a bit hit and miss, the first thing I always do is drop the colour saturation and the vivid colours back to zero, this goes a long way to remove the 'overcooked' HDR look.

Wind Turbines

I took this one a few days ago on one of my few days ago with a 'tog buddy. I thought we'd get some great photos but it was a bit of a nightmare composition wise and the great light that kept creeping through the clouds pretty much vanished. I was trying to use the fence as a leading line on this one to lead the eye into the turbine and the mean looking clouds, I did do a sepia version but decided to stay with colour this time. I was doing a product shot for a fan (air fan, not someone who loves my work) and made a composite image with the fan replacing the turbine which looked ok. Anyway the info on this one is ISO200, 16mm 1/80 f/8, I was hand holding and needed a reasonably fast shutter to stop the blades I also had a polariser on which cuts light by about 2 stops, but worth it if you have blue skies and clouds.

Farmers Field

As I haven't been out taking many landscapes of late I thought I'd see if I have anything in the back catalog and came up with this one. This is from a field near my house as the sun was going down. I probably didn't work on it as I have a decent number of tree shots and try to avoid adding to them, but they are just so damn photogenic. I have done a bit of HDR on this one in Dynamic Photo. The exif was ISO200, 126mm, 1/640, f4 don't ask why I didn't go to ISO100 and have 1/320 it's not like the cows are the fastest of movers!

My Buddy, The Medic

I haven't posted for ages and I thought I'd get back with a HDR shot taken of my friend who went with me up high street in the lake district today. I was explaining how it is possible to process a RAW file for HDR but you are better using a bracketed exposure, obviously this isn't possibly for moving subjects. You used to have to process the raw file 3 times and blend them together in photoshop but it really is much easier to use a dedicated HDR program such as photomatix or the one used for this photo, dynamic photo hdr. The clouds were fairly thick but still had a bit of texture too them so I under exposed by 2/3 so I didn't blow them out. There are plenty of sliders to play with in dynamic photo it just depends how much you want to cook your image. The painterly effect (if thats the right word) is a new feature in the latest version, it's called match colour, then you chose which sort of colour set you want, I recommend you give it a try. The exif for this one was ISO200, 16mm, f8, 1/320.

Lloyds Building

Another quick post I'm afraid, this was another from a recent trip to the big smoke, I managed to walk around all day and came away with very little. I've processed this one in photomatix (although I tend to use dynamic photo for HDR stuff) then I tweaked it with some presets I have in Lightroom, it might be a bit overcooked for some but it was another one of those experimental things.

Old HDR Photos

These are some landscape photos from last summer (what there was of it) that I bracketed the exposure on with a view to do some high dynamic range photos (HDR). A good tutorial for this kind of thing can be found here, for some reason I never processed these, probably because they didn't make the cut when picking my 'picks' I quite like having a bunch of bracketed photos, usually 2 stops either side of normal exposure as it is often easier than messing with graduated filters. Location wise, one taken in the lake district on a decidedly dodgy route up to pinnacle ridge and the other is at the bottom of my road. Anyway I'm not going to go into how they were captured because the new series of lost starts soon!

Back Catalog

I was looking at a friends photos on a certain social networking site and decided to play with some older photos as it's been far too cold to go out for landscapes recently, although I'll be out pretty quick if any snow settles. Anyway these two have been fairly heavily processed to get their full dynamic range (HDR photography) you can make it look a little more realistic but I was experimenting today. CS2 & 3 has HDR facilities and also photomatix is a popular bit of software, if you are into this sort of thing. It basically relies on you capturing multiple exposures of a scene to capture all the detail in the sky and also the relative dark land and then the software joins the images and you tweak the results. This is done by setting your exposure compensation to (typically) +2, 0 & -2 for each image. It's handy if you don't have time to fool around with graduated filters and the like. Anyway hope everyone had a good new year.