You don’t expect too many benefits from the Winter Vomiting Bug. OK, the weight loss is nice but probably not all that healthy. No, in this case I refer to last Saturday when, sadly, my daughter had been sick so we were quarantined from visting people. Because she was quite well and energetic we went to the Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh. Turned out to be a lovely day.
As I’m currently fixated with HDR, I spent the today with the camera permanently on the tripod* (which is easy with so much space). The light was universally fantastic and I got some very nice shots. One of which made it onto the BBC Website (no. 11). I don’t mind linking to them, always good to get traffic to new, upcoming sites.
Click to download hi-res images and see others in the same series
The HDR approach certainly helped with handling some pretty severe light at times. The low winter sun is great but some of the shots would have been impossible without the post-processing tonemapping trickery.
So, the vomit bug ain’t all bad…
On Friday, I also found out that the BBC had used another of my images for a while. Very nice indeed.
In other news, I won “Best of the Week” for the 2nd week in a row on Ipernity. Thanks to everyone there. One of the Botanic Gardens series is in the competition for the hat-trick!
* I have a monopod now so I’m looking forward to trying that
For your HDR malarkey do you have a sexy camera that’s auto-bracketing your shots, or are you doing it manually?
I set the camera up to bracket at -2.0eV, 0 and +2.0eV and then shoot three shots in burst mode, the camera does the rest.
You don’t need to do it this way but the alignment can be a problem. Shooting a 3-shot burst on the tripod pretty much guarantees that the alignment is fine.
My Sony will only do that at +/- 0.7eV which isn’t enough to get the most from HDR (so I’m told).
Manual will be more fun anyway (he wrote, chomping on a large bunch of sour grapes).
It should be OK manual if you use a tripod.
I’ve been using this:
http://www.mediachance.com/hdri/index.html
It does the alignment and lets you adjust manually.
Oh and don’t change the exposure by changing aperture, otherwise you will change depth of field and it won’t work, has to be set to Aperture Priority…
scott are you using a Canon EOS20D ?
Yessir.