Lee Orchard Photography

Last week I took a weeks break from work.  What a week it was weather wise too!  We had booked a few days on the Isle of Wight and planned to take Sunset photos, poppies and visit the Isle of Wight zoo, or Tiger Island as it was called on TV.

We were lucky, we managed to visit all the places and get the photos we were after.

This was the sunset! Its looking over Freshwater Bay.  We had seen the sunset start as we came out of the Wight Mouse after a meal, so ‘chased’ it along the military road to here.

I was really amazed with the colours.  It has been run through photomatix to balance the colours, but what a result!
The Tigers at the zoo were just as good!  I’ve made them into a ruler design.

The poppies were a bit more tricky.  We had been told roughly where to look, but still couldn’t find them.  On returning the our B&B the lady asked if we had found them.  Then she said she had spoken to a local photographer earlier and gave us directions to them.  So we did find them and in evening light too!

So thank you Ann!  This was one of the images!

We left the island, as usual, a little worn out but throughly enjoying ourselves

I had an idea the other day, I can’t remember what triggered it, but I thought I’d give it a go anyway!

I have a very popular image of a Spitfire, that above all the other Spitfires & Hurricanes, this alway comes out on top.

This may actually have been prompted after watching a programme on Spitfire, but like I said, I’m not sure. Anyway, many years ago my Dad used to admire and always want a photo that was similar to this.

So, enough waffle, what did I do? What I did actually was quite simple. I had a nice photo of this spitfire, with lots of fluffy white clouds in the background. It was a jpg, but I created 3 bracketed tiffs and put it though photomatix. This boosted the colours and made it a bit grainy. This was good. I then just turned it to sepia in lightroom and thats it.

This is the result.

Hopefully people can see this and it is linked from Flickr. If not, please take a look at my Flickr account.

I was really pleased with the result.

Hmm, I hadn’t realised it had been a month since my last posting! I must try to write more. I used to write on a daily basis but that was a while ago and I seem to forget or be too busy to think what to write.

I even missed the 3 years of blogging date! 8th May 06!
So whats new, well I’ve been sorting through the Prague images and creating more HDRs. Also I’ve been adding images to Flickr, its easier than writing blog entries, although I do tend to write a bit on there too about the image.

If you haven’t been following my Flickr page, then here are a couple of images that have been added recently.

The first is an IOW image from last year that I have created an HDR image from. I have to admit with this one, I saw a high contrast/saturation preview of it in photomatix, like it, so I have boosted the colours in photoshop to reflect the preview I saw.

The second is a photography from when I visited Scotney Castle. It was quite a dull day, but HDR has also rescued this.

I have to admit I am starting to use HDR more and more. I am finding the it is giving me the ability to rescue any exposure issues in tricky lighting conditions and is giving me the result that I am actually seeing with my eyes when I take the photo.