Lee Orchard Photography

What a mixed bag of weather we had over Easter! We had the lot, driving rain, snow, sleet and sun! It also mean’t it was a constant game of guessing when it was good to go out and risk the rain, or snow!

I managed to get a wide range of photos though everything from Steam Engines to Beaches! It seemed we were taking different photos each day. It was all great fun, and Easter was very enjoyable!
Friday and Monday were indoor photography sessions. Even the steam train was taken from indoors! After our success at smoke the other week, we tried water droplets. I’ll add these soon!

Saturday I got some interesting photos from Frensham Ponds and again, I’ll add a couple to the main site when I get a chance!

Anyway, hear are a couple of images from our day trip to the Isle of Wight on Sunday. The day started off with Snow in Farnham, but by the time we go to our destination on the IOW it was lovely sunshine.

This was the aftermath of the recent storm. Pretty Summer house: experience the seafront life….. hmm?

Further along the beach, things were a little more normally, although bitterly cold stinging strong winds!

Giving up on the seafront, we headed to Bembridge Harbour and the Duver.

So it was a very varied and enjoyable weekend and we only got wet once, ok, maybe twice!

I have been looking at HDR (High Dynamic Range) images for a while now but never actually created one. There are same brilliant HDR images on the web, but also I find that some just look over done and look more like paintings.

I guess that is ok, and they look interesting and different. I suppose it is what you want to get out of the image, what effect you are looking for.

At the moment I am just trying it to get more detail out of the photos and nothing more, although I have 2 images which will be posted soon that look a little more processed.

On walking to the local shop yesterday the lighting looked so good I thought I’d trying creating my first HDR from scratch. Typically, by the time I got back home, grabbed the camera, and headed out again, the light had gone!

Still, thought I’d try it out in dull light and it is meant to do well there too!

So I just took a plain normal shot, nothing special.

Uploaded the photo to the PC and downloaded a Demo of PhotoMatrix (hence the watermarks on the image)

Although the 3 image required for creating the HDR were taken in the space of 1 second, the tool still couldn’t quite align them, so gives a slightly ghosted effect. I think other images on the web have the same problem, hence the effect seem on some of these. Practice!

So, here it is!

I’ve been playing around with the smoke images that I took on Sunday and created myself a couple of new desktop backgrounds.

I’m really please with this one!

I also created a new bookmark and mouse mat design based on coloured smoke. They look quite good, and its something different!

This is something that I saw listed on the photographic forum, and looked like fun. So yesterday we thought we would give it a go.

Firstly we tried taking just the photos of the smoke, nothing clever. This took a bit of playing around with and moving the flash to different locations to get the darkest backgrounds

Then we trying adding coloured filters to the flash. At first it didn’t work, but then we started to get some results.

We tried, light green, blue, dark orange, orange & yellow. The blue was good, and the orange came out a nice golden colour.

Here are images from the blue and dark orange filter.

Lastly I added a Paintshop Pro colour grad to one of them to see what that would look like.

If was great fun, although quite smoking and we used up a set of fully charged AA batteries on the flash.