Infrared Shed

I was in the peaks again yesterday, went for a nice walk around Froggart. I spotted this shed and tree from the car and quickly jumped out to get it. I was using my new wide angle lens (16-35 L) which was an absolute joy, it's nice to be able to get quite close and still fit everything in. I also had a polariser on which really brought out the blues in the colour version, but as I'm still in a mono mood I'm only posting this one. It was taken at 16mm, f/16 for 1/15 sec at ISO100, I did have another version with a sheep's skull as foreground interest but I prefer this version because of the whispy clouds.

(Edit: I'm just putting the colour one up for some one who wanted a comparison)

Panoramic Photography

I took this one a few months back up in Whitby (the abbey was behind me in this shot). There are a few important points to remember when getting panoramic photos.

• Always shoot in portrait mode, this gives more height to the finished shot.
• Set your tripod level with the horizon, some tripods have a spirit level on them if not you can get hotshoe mounted ones for a few quid.
• Shoot in manual keeping your aperture, shutterspeed, iso, focal length, focus point and white balance the same for each shot. Meter from where the middle of your panorama will be, if you meter from the sunny side everything else will be underexposed, if you meter from a relatively dark area you risk over exposing the brighter bits.
• Keep an overlap of about 30%, so if you are panning from left to right look for a feature, such as a tree that is about a third of the way in from the right then when you pan your tripod right, frame so that tree is on the left of the shot. That sounds more complicated than it is.

If you get these basics right you should have a good set of say 4-8 photos that can be stitched using CS3. Photoshop has a really good automatic stitching program (file - automate - photomerge) there are other programs such at PTGui that do a good job too. This panoramic was taken at f/16, 1/4 sec, 43mm at ISO100 I had an 0.9ND grad filter to balance the sky. The file has been drastically reduced so it has a smaller size.

More Mono Mayhem

I was out shooting with a photo buddy yesterday in the peak district national park. The weather was glorious and I tried to pump up the colours further by pretty much using my polariser on every shot and trying to shoot perpendicular to the sun. I knew I would be converting the majority of my shots to mono as I thought the bright sunlight wasn't moody enough for my landscapes.

There hasn't been a great deal of processing with these 2 images, I converted them in Lightroom, took them into CS3 where I added an unsharp mask for contrast (settings: Amount 35, Radius 200 & Threshold 1) and a Black & White adjustment layer. I think mono images are quite striking and you don't need to shoot during the golden hours.

Back to Mono

I was reading a black and white photo book and felt compelled to get out and shoot some monochrome images. I waited till to sun was low and went out on my quest for foreground interest. I didn't come away with a great deal, the sunset was great but I broke my own rules and came away about 10 minutes too early, I had to walk home backwards looking at the colours getting better and better! Anyway a polariser was used to really bring out the blue of the sky, I was at 90 degrees to the sun as this is where you get maximum effect of the polarising filter and I could get the light hitting the fence and grass. In photoshop used an unsharp mask to add a bit of contrast then some dodge and burning to selectively add contrast. Next I added a BW adjustment layer then flattened the image and converted to grey scale mode and then to duo tone mode, then I set to tri tone and used black and a 2 brown tones (can't remember the pantone codes). I converted back to RGB mode and saved. This split toning can be done in lightroom but I fancied doing it in CS3.

Warm Sky

I took this earlier today as I was out expecting a good sunset but in the end it was just windy and a little too much cloud. I used a 3 stop ND grad, to balance the exposure, which I set to manual, 1/5sec f/16 24mm at ISO 100. I couldn't find much in the way of foreground interest but I wanted to make the clouds the focal point. I processed the RAW file in Lightroom and added a warm up filter in CS3.

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!