A New Year

New year thoughts “Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it and remember that not getting what you want is sometimes the blessing.”

New year images…we were blessed with snow again this week…and I’ve been playing with HDR….some results below.

Variations….

Click image to enlarge.

A little about the HDR shots. Three photographs bracketed by 1 stop were blended as a high dynamic range file in Photoshop or Photomatix. Since I didn’t use a tripod to take the shots and the alignment in PhotoShop is better than the alignment done in Photomatix, it produced a higher quality result in PhotoShop, with no indication of ghosting resulting from the blend of three not quite lined up images. The resulting tone mapping in PhotoShop was very disappointing and Photomatix does a much better job of that, so that was used for the tone mapping. When the images line up perfectly, I think that Photomatixs also does a better job of the HDR file too, but it’s early days yet and I am certainly no expert in this technique!

Venice

A little shot from Venice, with just a touch of softness and texture added.

Sea pictures

From Dorset…

Weathered

Threatening weather – Holy Island

Isle St Louis

More Paris…Isle St Louis, where many wealthy Parisians have their home. We had arrived in Paris on a rather dull and overcast afternoon. By the time we checked into our hotel, though, the clouds were starting to clear, so we dashed down to the River Seine to catch the last light of the day.

This image is a panoramic stitch of three separate exposures.

Tunnel

One of my favourite places for urban photography – La Defense in Paris. This is actually a bridge over the main road, linking buildings on either side, but it gives a tunel effect to me. It can look a bit shabby and drab until the sunlight catches it in the right place. I tried it in both colour and mono.

I find the colours very attractive, but there’s more of a feeling of being taken into the picture in the mono version.

Iris

To add to my small collection of flower pictures, this purple iris was given a gentle bend in the stem to echo the bend in the glass vase.

Free Range

“I’m looking at you, chick”

The Guardians

…and also for September, The Guardians….

Layer Mask Tutorial

Photographers new to picture editing with PhotoShop often have difficulty at first with the concept of Layer Masks. There is a tutorial on my main web site here .

Country Bride

A rural scene from France.

Divided

These old tools have been hanging around in our garage for ages and I kept meaning to photograph them.
I came across them again whilst looking for something else. One day I’ll find time to do more than this quick “snap”. But I think they have lots of possibilities….