Boston Waterway (HDR)
Back in Spring 08 I took a week off, and took myself off for one fine day up to Boston, in Lincolnshire, to take advantage of the sunny blue skies. It was – as is normal for me – a day of experimentation, and this picture is fairly nondescript (I think) in terms of both composition and subject. But it was a great sky and I thought it would make a useful tester for when I got around to doing some HDR techniques. And so it proved:
Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX lens at 12mm, 1/400 sec at f 16, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Great shooting conditions. Triple processed in Photoshop CS3’s Raw converter (exposed at zero, -1, +1.5), then HDR processed in Photomatix Pro, then resized and sharpened in Pain Shop Pro. Yes, a clunky procedure but you should see my fingers flying over the keys, it’s like watching Rick Wakeman. Anyway, the result’s pretty pleasing to the eye, and more or less a technical success. By the way, I absolutely don’t mind about the VW Golf parked across the water, this wasn’t meant to be art, and it’ll certainly never go up before a panel of judges…
Dogs in Darkness
Lazy Saturday night in for me and Marie, but nobody told our two puppies. So what was meant to be a cosy evening in with a DVD or two ended up as a play session with the dogs. This was taken with a powerful flash gun, aimed directly at them – which made the background go almost pitch black. A bit of work in Levels later, and here we have the finished, slightly Marxist, image of a couple of bouncy little Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, planning their revolution…
Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX lens at 10mm, 1/60 sec at f 5.6, ISO 200, hand held with flash. This was pretty much as it came out of the camera, I darkened a touch but I was in experimental mode and found that aiming the SB-800 flash straight at them created this striking, low-key portrait effect.
Paw Show
Here’s Beefy the cat, taking up a strong defensive position against our two dogs:
Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX lens at 20mm, 1/60 sec at f 5.6, ISO 200 hand held with flash. Location: under the sideboard in the hallway.
An Incredible Photo Blog
Now this is what I’m talking about:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/12/the_year_2008_in_photographs_p.html
No one person could put together a blog like that, of course, but that doesn’t diminish Boston.com’s claim to have produced the greatest photo blog – ever.
