Category: HDR Photography

A Short Break

A Short Break

We had a short break on the Isle of Wight. We visit there once or twice a year, but this time was the first time that our youngest was walking around on his own, so he throughly enjoyed exploring all the places we visited.

I had wanted to visit some of the southern coastlines to get some interesting shots with rock in the foreground and long exposured water, but as with most things, time conspired against us.

So we I had to settle for the scenery where we were visiting, or where we were passing. As usual with the island, it didn’t disappoint.

Robin Hill adventure park was great for kids, but it was also great for scenery!

I had wanted to try some more vertorama photography (2 or more photos, vertical panorama), so I tried it out on a couple of occassions. This is a view at Robin Hill


View at Robin Hill

Another view that is great is Brading Down, so I tried the another vertorama


View from Brading Down

I have now created a few of these, so I am going to create a Vertorama section to the website, under Creative

Rural Life Centre

Rural Life Centre

After dong the Floral Fringe Fair on Saturday, with our friends from Home Front History, on Sunday we took the kids to the Rural Life Centre.

They had an event on ‘Days Gone By’ where they had lots of old things! We saw Steam Rollers, mini steam driven merry-go-rounds, steam engines as well as a steam train ride and a tractor ride to a nearby milking farm.

Amongst the steam engines and old cars was this gem. An large American Truck.
American Truck

The kids loved the day out and it was all very enjoyable.

The above image is a bracketed HDR image from 3 RAW files and processed in Photomatix v4

1st Vertorama

1st Vertorama

I finally managed to process my 1st ever vertorama! Its of Freshwater Bay on the Isle of Wight

A vertorama is a a panaromic photo but it is made up from vertical images instead of landscape format. This creates a large square format photo, which I really think shows of the subject of the photos.

I took these photos back in 2010, so its taken a while to create this final version, but I think it was worth the wait! It’s made up of 3 vertical images, mannually alligned and blended together.

Freshwater Bay Vertorama

I then went on to create another of Brading Down. Now I have created these, I just need to take more photos to make more Vertoramas!!

New HDR Section for my HDR Images

New HDR Section for my HDR Images

I have finally finished designing the new HDR section for my website.

It is a different layout to the rest of the site, with new snazzy bits.

One area need a little tweak to improve it, but it is all now live and ready to view.

New HDR Galleries

Can you access it here. HDR Galleries

JPEG HDR Before & After

JPEG HDR Before & After

As I have only been regularly taking RAW image instead of JPEG images for just over a year, I am limited to the HDR images that I can created.

So, I occassionally look back over some old jpg images to see if they can be used to create ‘hdr’ images or not.

Sometimes they work well, like my Mustang in with the stormy clouds and othertimes they don’t.

Over Christmas I took a look at some of the old images and created this one below.  I thought I’d post a before and after.

Alhambra
What do you think?

2 New HDR Images

2 New HDR Images

Last night, feeling a bit fed up, I decided to look through some more of my Isle of Wight images to see what I could turn into HDRs.

After looking through a few, I selected 2 and created a couple of processed images.

When saving the second photo, I noticed that the filename started with an underscore. They normally are IMG_0001.jpg etc.. but this one was _MG_0001.jpg. I quickly checked the other and it was the same.

Whilst this is not an issue, we have noticed that Nats camera saves images starting with underscore, mine doesnt. It a good way of identifying photos if we save them to one location.

This is what had happened when we were on that trip. I only had my harddrive so we saved them to that.

So, thinking I was creating my HDRs I had inadvertently processed 2 of Nat images. So I still didnt create any new HDR images of my own last night! 🙁