How to add an Artistic Frame to your Digital Photos!

You can see from my last blogpost that I have gone in a different direction regarding posting my images online and I'd like to thank everyone here for the comments and responses contributed. Believe me, I do understand and realise that there is no foolproof way of protecting your images, but this is a way of turning the whole thing into a positive. It's about presentation as well, not just about putting my name on it.

So as promised, here are my steps to making a photo frame such as the one used in the photograph above. In fact, this is a step-by-step guide to making that exact photo frame. At this point I will state that of course all colours, fonts, styles, dimensions etc are entirely up to you, but this is how I do it. And as I have no right to call this photo frame my own, feel free to use it! I should also state that as you may know, I am by no means an expert in Photoshop, and am absolutely sure there are quicker ways of doing this. If there is a step you believe I can compact, please let me know!:

Pre-Step: Make sure all your regular photo processing is done. I do not do any further processing after creating the frame around the picture.

Step 1: With your finished photo, select Layer / New Fill Layer / Solid Color. Call the layer what you want and select any colour you want (it's not important here). Also make sure Mode is normal and Opacity 100%. In the Colour Picker box that pops up, take the cursor to the very top left corner until it is bright white and press OK. So now you have a new layer that is completely white.

Step 2: Make sure you swap the layers, so that your new fill layer is at the bottom and your photograph the top layer.

Step 3: Select Image / Canvas Size. Set your width as 4cm and the height as 7cm. Make sure Relative is ticked and then click OK. Your frame appears!

Step 4: Select Edit / Stroke. Set your width as 10px and the colour Grey. Also select Location as Outside, Blending Mode Normal and the Opacity as 100%. Click OK and the inside Grey frame appears.

Step 5: Select Text (the big T in the square box). As you can see, I use a medium/dark grey for the colour of my text. Select the font Trajan Pro at 24pt and write your title in the middle of the frame below the picture. Select Text again and select the font as Savoye LET 24pt. If you fancy 'signing' the frame, write this text below the title.

Your frame is now complete!

Optional Step 6: If you use a white frame like me, you may want to add a thin black border around it, so it stands out on websites that have white backgrounds such as Flickr (and this blog).

Merge your layers together and then select Filter / Nik Software / Color Efex Pro 4 (assuming you have it!). Select the Image borders filter and then use Type 13 / Spread -10% / Size -96%. Make sure Clean slider is fully to the left. Now click OK and this will take you back to Photoshop. Save your image and upload it to your audience online! (Please note, again I state I'm sure there is a way to complete this optional step without going into Nik Software, so am open to tips!)

See you all next time!

Building a Newbury Sunset

Now I had to check I hadn't posted this photo on this blog before but it turns out I haven't. You may recognise this picture, I have had it on other websites such as Smugmug and Flickr for nearly 2 years now, but looking different. You see I have given this photo the remastered process recently, as I have done a few other pictures.

I have probably discussed on this site more than any other topic, the idea of re-processing a photograph. I have traditionally been against it, but I think (as I stated on The Swan Hotel, Bibury post) that if you have pictures that were taken on a tripod, no matter at what stage of your development as a photographer, you should be able to go back reprocess and improve it. I say 'that were taken on a tripod' because these pictures will normally be the ones that are sharp, with no blur, whether you were a great photographer then or not. And when I took this picture in May 2011 I was not a great photographer, but I did take pictures like this on a tripod, giving me great opportunity years later to revisit it.

I believe I have improved it over my original (sharper, less 'irrelevant' detail, brighter, straighter!) and reprocessing old photos this way will help you realise how far you have come as a photographer. I always liked my title for this picture, and being as the cranes in the photo were only a temporary feature, it means that the photo is unlikely to be able to be taken as it is again. My favourite kind of photo!

The Face

Today's picture is one I took last Friday night of this piece of artwork that I believe has recently been erected outside a block of residential homes in Newbury. I have no idea who it is by or what it is called but is one of two heads that face each other (the other one is made of different material and much less remarkable). Even a local resident who was walking by with her dog was asking if I knew anything about this piece of art, as there is not even a mention of who created it, which she found very disappointing. Maybe we will find out more about it in the near future but I knew I had to take a picture of it when I was driving past this area a couple of weeks, having not seen it myself before. 'The Face' as I have called it gives out a very striking appearance when viewed from all kinds of angles. It is a fantastic piece of art.

This is almost entirely a single exposure, processed in Lightroom (beginning with the Yesteryear preset). I did however create a separate HDR version, processed it in the same way in Lightroom, and then blended very lightly, some of the HDR aspects onto the face in Photoshop. This helped it look like the face that it is, rather than just a dark silhouette of bolts against the sky.

Photo details: F/8, 0.1s, 26mm, ISO 200

Pub Humour

For the second time in about a month, the good old British pub is the subject of this blog. Though at least with this one (as opposed to my King Charles Tavern post a few weeks back), I managed to couple it with an interesting sky. This scene is across the road from The Five Bells pub (out of the picture to the right) which is towards the north of Newbury. I took this picture while out driving the other night, looking for interesting subjects to capture and like many pictures I take that involve roads, there were a few people checking I wasn't a speed camera trap! As if the Police would be so obvious standing by the road with a huge camera and a tripod!

This may not be the funniest pub board anyone has seen but I still felt it made the picture fairly interesting, coupled with the road and the sky. There is a pub called The Halfway Inn between Newbury and Hungerford that used to be renowned for humorous pub boards. The Halfway Inn sits along the busy A4 road and the pub were always trying to tempt people in with boards that read along the lines off 'special offer tonight' or 'check out our new menu' when one day I think they had had enough and simply wrote 'Does anyone even notice this board?'. That then began a year of daily witty writings on that board, my favourite of which was written the day after England got knocked out of the Euro 2004 tournament which simply said 'Plasma TV for sale'.

This is apparently my 100th blog post today and though I would have reached that milestone a lot quicker if I had had a daily blog like last year, I feel much happier with this blog and can safely say it won't be going anywhere soon!

Time for a Clean

Now I know very well that one of the last places you would expect to find a photographer looking for inspiration is within a sewage works plant but that is exactly where this picture was taken. It's actually looking into the sewage works (in Thatcham) as I had managed to fit my camera through the fence. Even I would not really want to wander that far into this location because you can smell it from miles away as it is. Sometimes I don't know what draws me to a particular scene such as this one. I used to naively think that photography was about all about capturing beauty in all it's forms and though that certainly is a big motivator for many photographers (including myself), what about capturing something ugly, derelict or even disturbing? That's what motivates many other photographers as well and I think I am quite attracted to the derelict or abandonment of some places. Although I'm not suggesting this cleaning facility (I think it is anyway) at the sewage plant is unused, it hardly looks like it is well looked after either.

I've mentioned before a book that really inspired me with my HDR photography and that is Practical HDR by David Nightingale. Some of the urban and derelict scenes he captured in that book have definitely influenced me with some of my photography and I think that is why I am attracted to capture pictures such as this.

Bridge 45

Recently, I've been doing a bit of soul searching with this blog, trying to figure it out what is the point of it and where do I want to go with it? Do other photography bloggers feel that? My love for photography has not diminished at all in the recent years that I have 'discovered' my passion for it but I am questioning a little if blogging is the right outlet for my creativity? There are so many different platforms out there for photographers now (which you all know of so I won't list them) and you get an incredible amount of time difference between how often some photographers post pictures compared to others. There are your daily blogs such as the incredibly successful stuckincustoms.com by Trey Ratcliff, to the post-less-frequently approach by Klaus Herrmann (farbspiel-photo.com) and many other artists on Flickr.

With this blog, I promise 3 pictures a week, which is good for me because it keeps me working on this blog and producing new photos. But in an ideal world, I do believe that like Klaus Herrmann, I would simply post pictures when I feel that one is ready. I know of all my recent pictures, that my 'Like a Setting Sun' picture has had a particularly great response on this website and other sites such as Flickr. Maybe this is the only picture I should have posted recently? The problem with promising a quantity of pictures in a certain time (and I'm guessing this must drive Trey Ratcliff nuts sometimes) is that you often find yourself not particularly inspired, but having to post a photo to not fail on your quotient. The artist in me wants not to be forced to put up with my own restrictions and sometimes plea 'Look, I just haven't got a photo today!'. But then I don't want to fail on my promises either and in the end, I'm satisfied with the fact that producing regular photos can only make me better (he says hoping).

So that brings me back to the original point, what do I want to achieve with this blog? Am I happy it being just a bit of fun and a great way to share my love of photography or am I secretly hoping it will achieve much more? Many people like myself find themselves setting up photography blogs once they have been bitten by the photography bug, because it is a fantastic and personal way to get your creativity 'out there'. But do we need to have them? Would it be more satisfying to just upload pictures occasionally, but ones that were your absolute very best work? I'm writing a lot of questions today without knowing the answers myself but that was the point of writing this blog. I thought about writing a blog on Sunday that was going to be titled 'Time for a break' and at one point had made up my mind that I was going to take a little time off and come back when I felt like (in my gut) I had a bucket load of wonderful pictures to post one blog after the next. But as you can tell, I decided to stick with it and focus on new ideas and other avenues I could perhaps think of for my photography. I don't think I really know what I do want from this blog, but at the moment, I kind of like that.

Bridge 45

I took this picture on Sunday while walking along the Kennet & Avon canal in Newbury, whilst the weather had upgraded from absolutely dismal to mediocre. I'm not an expert on canals, canal bridges or canal barges, but I think the 45 obviously means something to people who like to travel along the canal. This is actually a rail bridge that goes over the canal at this point, so that may have some significance. It's an HDR shot taken from 4 exposures (-2 to +1) and was pictured with my latest (artistic) weapon, the D700.

Winterbourne Church

Yesterday I had some spare time on my hands, so I decided that as the evening sky was looking quite promising, I would just go out in my car and see what I could find. In fact, a lot of my photography is achieved that way. Yes I do have day trips planned now and then, but by and large a lot of my photography (especially this year) is done by just deciding I will go out and find something to capture.

I took some pictures around central Newbury, which I know I have covered quite a lot but it's not so much the locations I am interested in anymore, rather than the scene I come across at one particular time. I used to think great photography meant travelling far to capture great scenes but I know now that isn't true. I've seen many great pictures that could have been taken absolutely anywhere, such was the scene captured rather than the location. The sky was looking increasingly dramatic, so I decided to venture out of a Newbury a bit to find a great vantage point to capture the setting sun amongst the sky. I stumbled across the village of Winterbourne, which I have only been to once before (great pub restaurant there!). I saw some signs that lead to the church that was a little bit out of the village and felt that might be an interesting place. It was a nice if perhaps not perfect location, so I took the opportunity to take various pictures while around this church and found this picture to be one of the better results.

I have talked quite a bit recently about my new D700 but one thing that is a massive advantage to me with this camera, is being able to keep lots of detail in the picture, without having to add too much noise reduction. On single photos, even in lowlight conditions, the noise is hardly noticeable, but as you add exposures together for an HDR it becomes a little bit noticeable. Tackling this with some noise reduction kit (Topaz Denoise is my preferred choice) does not affect detail of the picture though, barely at all. This was not the case with my D90.

Like a Setting Sun

And now for something completely different! I always try and state emphatically when I post a non-HDR picture on here, that my goal in photography was never to be exclusive or predominantly HDR and the thought always still occupies my mind. A lot of people who get into photography these days do naturally find themselves gaining a particular passion for HDR, because it provides something new and interesting in the modern photographic world. I still think most people gain a passion for photography first and then develop an enthusiasm for HDR afterwards. My goal has always been to produce pictures that are somewhat artistic and HDR is obviously a great method for achieving that, but if I get the look by other means, then I'm still just as happy.

One of the advantages of having my D700 and the F2.8 lens is that it allows me to get reasonably close to a particular subject and create a great bokeh effect in the background. I took this picture while out rambling along the hills of Combe in Berkshire, mainly famous for the gallows that once stood there. It's a fantastic place to get good sunsets and that was my aim on Monday night. The sunset itself was a bit hit and miss, there was a fantastic glow of red below the sun, but the mist and the clouds were too thick to get a stunning effect. Therefore, I tried something different. I always remember there being good opportunities to get close up to the wheat grass and use the sunlight to highlight the effect, as this early Flickr picture of mine shows. The sun wasn't that bright on Monday but I still tried to get some abstract shot of the glow of the sun in the background behind the moving wheat grass. What you see today is the result of that and this was processed entirely in Lightroom.

Victoria's Lions

Having struggled a couple of months ago to find new pictures for this blog, I now find myself with a fair few new pictures to choose from. Unlike the intention of this blog, most pictures that will be posted in the near future will all mainly be from the UK. I stated this at the start of the year, when I let it be known that due to a house move and getting married in September, foreign travel this year was going to be difficult. I am visiting Poland twice in the next 4 months (once to get married), so that will provide more opportunities for 'global' pictures and if I am lucky, I plan to visit 2 more countries by the end of the year as well, but we will see how things go.

Today's picture is another one I took while out looking for Diamond Jubilee pictures to capture around Newbury last week. I have lived in the Newbury area (with a few years in-between living in Cheltenham) for the best part of 27 years and have never come across this statue in a local park before. That's rather embarrassing as the park is called Victoria Park but I never realised there was a statue of Queen Victoria within it. At least it proves there are still gems to be found near your local area if you look hard enough (or open your eyes at all in my case). This is another HDR picture taken from 5 exposures on my new Nikon D700. I added a tiny bit of Topaz Adjust to the statues and used the glamour glow (very slightly) and cross balance filters in Nik Color Efex Pro 4.

The Circus is in Town

My first HDR to have been created using my D700, this was another picture taken amongst the Jubilee celebrations last weekend. I stated on Tuesday that Newbury didn't seem to offer much in terms of Jubilee celebrations but there was a circus that rolled into town for the long weekend. I recently had a discussion regarding art with a lady during which I stated that 99% of all the photographs I take are not pre-visioned in my head. There have been some in the past such as my Building a Newbury Sunset that I already had a pre-conceived idea about, weeks before I took it. But that is rare. Most of the time I turn up to locations and events to get inspired by what is around me and let the ideas crop up in my head then. This circus box office wagon is an example of an idea that gripped hold of me once I spotted it. Having noticed there was a circus in the area (the noise from the rehearsals attracted me), I wanted to find a good photographic opportunity to capture the uniqueness of the circus. Most of the area was for the time-being closed off but obviously the ticket sales wagon wasn't and after the punters had stopped buying tickets for a moment or two, I simply took some snaps of this fantastic box office.

On an artistic note, I deliberately decided to keep the noise of the sky in the picture, though at the same time softening it. I don't normally go for a really gritty look in Photomatix but because of the rain that was coming down at the time, it worked so much more for this picture than a clean look. Keeping the noise in kept the picture consistent on all levels.

A final note; my new D700 doesn't take pictures like my D90 does in 2 stops intervals (if you want it to) but only does them 1 stop at a time. Therefore, to get the usual -2 to +2 range, I have to shoot 5 exposuress but thats ok because it gives me more pictures and therefore options to play with in post-processing. So this is an HDR from 5 different bracketed shots.

It's Raining on Jubilee

It's been a weekend of celebrations in the United Kingdom the last few days, with it being the 60th year of Queen Elizabeth's reign. I did ponder for quite a while whether to go to London or not to capture the festivities there but in the end for various reasons I decided to stay in West Berkshire and see what I could capture here. Today's picture is the first one I am posting from my new Nikon D700 camera (more about that below). It is obviously not an HDR picture but a moment I captured of Asian tourists (I think) looking a bit bewildered by the bad ('standard' if you're British) weather above all the celebrations. Being quite drizzly as it was didn't help bring the crowds out in Newbury and without having a dig at my local town, I didn't think there was a lot going on for the jubilee. I just thought there would be more that's all. I would say to end this bit 'Here's to the next 60 years!' but forgive me for thinking that's rather improbable. Being once a history student, I am very fond of our monarchy and is one of the essences of 'Britishness'. Long may it continue!

So why the D700?


This is the bit I wanted to write the other day before the bad weather ruined any chance of getting some pictures before Sunday. After my house move, I had a bit of money left over and therefore decided to upgrade my photographic equipment. Nikon has just brought out the D800, so why did I buy the camera it is to replace, the D700? Well there are a few reasons really, so where shall I start....Of course, the price does come into it. The D800 currently costs £1000 more than the D700 and is very hard to get hold of. I could have afforded the D800 but what do you get for the extra £1000? Video recording capability - not interested (even if I was, I have that on my D90 anyway), improved image quality (I'm not sure about that but will come back to it) and the 'biggie', the 36 megapixel sensor.

One of the photographic books I own is a book called 'Transient Light' by Ian Cameron (he's a good guy by the way and signed my copy before sending it to me). He is a professional landscape photographer and he makes it very clear at the beginning of his book that he still almost entirely shoots with film. He writes "Most modern cameras far exceed my personal requirements, instead offering a huge array of features that have little relevance to the way I work, and simply constitute needless clutter on a camera" (pg. 62). Now I would apply this statement to the 36 megapixel feature. I don't need 36 megapixels and in fact do not want this. The D700 is by comparison 12.1 Megapixels, which is similar to the D90 I have shot with for the last 2 years. As most photographers know (but Curry's salesman won't tell you), megapixels are not about the quality of an image but the size of it. With my D90, I print quite standardly around 75cm x 50cm, though I have printed up to A1 size. These images still look quality with perhaps only a little softer look for the A1 print I did. Unless you are a professional billboard photographer, I don't know why you would want a 36 megapixel camera. The image size is so huge that you can't capture nearly as many photographs on memory cards and I have read more than one comment by D800 users saying that their photographic software has slowed down massively as a result. I think a 18 to 20 megapixel camera would have been much more sensible for an upgrade, as I would never want any more than that.

Image quality is always the thing I care about most and if there is no difference between the D700 and the D800 here than the £1000 extra is simply a waste. I have looked at and compared all the test shots on the Nikon simulator at their website and I can't see any difference at all. I have seen some websites point the difference out if you magnify the images and start cranking up the ISO but again this to me is so minimal it becomes a non-issue. We photographers choose to pursue an expensive hobby/career, one which we are prepared to make a few sacrifices for to afford the best equipment. But we have to come back down to earth sometimes. £1000 is a lot of money for most people and when I can't notice a difference in image quality for that amount of money, then there is no way you are going to convince me to buy it. For me the D700 is a sensible choice and I look forward to using it for the next few years. I chose to buy the Nikkor 24-700m F2.8 lens with it that set me back another wad of money but hey, I saved some money with not going for the D800.

I know if I had bought the 24-70mm lens alone for my D90, it would have been a major upgrade as it is, but I have no regrets at buying the D700. I wanted a full frame camera, which I can build my equipment around in future and also have the option to shoot with 14 bit RAW files as opposed to 12 bit. In fact, the D90 and D700 are 2 different levels of camera, so all the differences aren't worth listing here but suffice to say the D90 isn't going anywhere. I still have it and will use it as backup (though I think more likely my fiancé will use it all the time). Now if only the D700 weighed less, I could say it was better than the D90 in every way, but change for bad or good always comes with compromises....

The Clock Tower

Not the famous one from Back to the Future unfortunately but the one that marks the end of the high street in Newbury, Berkshire. With the dreary weather we have had in England recently, this is one of only a few shots I have taken. I missed a potentially good shot by about 3 minutes the other day, while I was driving back to my new home in Thatcham. I crossed over one of the bridges that runs over the canal and there was a spectacular sunset sky reflected in the canal along with the silhouettes of the trees. I thought about pulling over right at that moment but suddenly remembered that despite having my camera with me, I didn't have a tripod, which would have been crucial to getting a good HDR. I quickly nipped back to the apartment to pick it up but when I returned a few moments afterwards, the moment had gone.

There are of course many lessons to be learned there but with my half glass full approach, the one that cheers me up in those situations is I think to myself 'It's better to have missed the shot, than not know it existed at all'. At least that way you can capture it another time.

Overlooking Newbury

I'm happy to accept the opinion that I'm scraping the barrel now for new photographs because it's quite true. Although being the town I live nearest to, Newbury is in my own opinion perhaps featuring a bit to much on this website. Without going into much detail today, this is an aerial view of the town, pictured from the bridge that connects the Wharf with the new Parkway Shopping Centre. The stretch of water is the Kennet & Avon canal.

I know I need to go out and take more pictures but perhaps just as importantly, I need to go back through all my pictures in Lightroom and find some gems I have perhaps overlooked. I never intend to force myself into going and getting new pictures as quickly as possible, therefore Thursday's picture will be a 'classic' picture from last year. Hope you are all still with me recently though???

I just realised, it's May 1st today. May is always a good time and generally one of my favourite months, so I'm sure good things will come...

Gateway to the Castle

An appropriate picture and title for today's blog, as my most recent bit of news involves castles. More specifically, postcards of castles. Two of my Warwick Castle photographs are now on sale at Warwick Castle as postcards and of course I am very excited about this. I was contacted a couple of months ago about using these pictures (Link 1 and Link 2) for postcards at Warwick Castle and now this week I have been sent my own copies and couldn't be more thrilled that my photography is now available to buy (yes I know they're only postcards!) at Warwick Castle.

So to tie in with that good piece of news, I am posting a picture of another castle, Windsor Castle, one of the oldest and most majestic historical structures in the British Isles. This is not an HDR picture (that's 2 in a row, a record for me?) and was processed entirely in Lightroom 4. This is not the great gate that is the main entrance to the entire fortress but one of the smaller entrances, once you are within the castle walls.

Is anyone else in the UK struggling with photographic motivation and inspiration with all the miserable weather we've been having recently?

The Wedding Party

A slight change for me today. I'm not a wedding photographer and despite encouragement from others, I never will be. It's just not for me. I have taken pictures at a couple of weddings I've been to but that is purely in the realms of art and creativity, not as a responsibility or service. The idea of being paid and therefore held responsible for capturing someone's special day is just not for me. Without being too modest, it's just in my nature to want to experiment with different ideas and pictures at the capture stage and in processing and I'm not sure this would be to everyone's liking. I recently took a few pictures at my friend David's wedding on Saturday and if you do want to see a few of those pictures, you can at my facebook page http://facebook.com/petehalewood. There's only a few there at the moment but there will more to come, perhaps even on this blog.

Today's picture was also taken on Saturday and is of the wedding party, once we were at the Elcot Park Hotel near Hungerford, where the reception was. The one thing this hotel does not lack is a beautiful view of the surrounding landscape, which I have tried to capture with this picture. It is a non-HDR shot and was processed entirely in Lightroom 4.

Welcome to Newbury

Having moved into my new apartment now, I have one more task left before I anticipate my busy period being over. That is, on Saturday I will be Best Man to one of my mates at his wedding. It is a great honour to do this and the first time I have been a best man but like most of them around this time, nearly all my thoughts are on my speech that I will have to give. I am working on it but naturally want to spend as much time as possible to make sure it's really good and dare I say it, funny. That's the best man's job really though isn't it? Although I'm really looking forward to this weekend, I will be very happy that on Sunday I can concentrate once more on having much more time to myself and photography. I'm hoping that I will have a new picture to post on Thursday but Sunday will almost certainly be another one of my 'classics'.

Today's picture is one I took as I was about to travel to London a couple of weeks ago. This is just outside the Newbury Railway Station and welcomes people to this rural town once they get off the train. As the train station is actually at the end of this road to the right, I can't help but feel that the sign should face that way but I'm sure there are reasons why it does not. This is a HDR picture from 3 exposures with an extra exposure created out of the -2 exposure to capture more of the sun and the colour of the early morning sky.

The Canal Path

I'm almost completely moved into my new apartment now and the computer (basically meaning my digital photography workstation) has now followed me in. So I'm back up and running full time on the photographs but need to get on and process a few now.

Today's photo is by my own judgement not a classic but it was one that I was able to spend about half an hour yesterday evening processing just after I moved my computer in. I know that the Kennet & Avon canal features quite a lot in my pictures but this is what the local scenery is like. This was taken a couple of weeks ago when we were having some very unseasonably warm weather in the UK. It has not been like this over the Easter weekend. The clouds and rain came back home. When the sun is out though, waterways and other water landscapes are always great for capturing sunsets or 'late in the evening' sceneries.

Although I am now moved in, I still have a couple of busy weeks ahead of me but without making too many excuses, my plan is to get back out and take some pictures as soon as possible. I was hoping to visit Paris again this spring but the move into this new property has made that highly unlikely. It simply comes down to all the money spent moving into here. So I'll just have to get creative in good old Blighty!

Newbury Twilight

                                                    It seems that it is often the case in a photographic blogger's journey that one has to plead busyness for his or her lack of activity or content. I have chosen to plead that case this week. I am in the middle of a very busy house move which is obviously (I hope you guys understand!?) taking up an enormous amount of my time (and money!). It is my fiancés and I first property together and we are currently buying and filling it with all kinds of furniture necessary. We are very excited about the move, though it is a bit of a drain on my creative energy. I still need to get round to fully writing up that Piccadilly blog from the other day but I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has kept coming to the blog site, I will have much more time to return the favour over the Easter weekend when most of the hard work with our place should be done.

Today's picture is more like my kind of work from last year but that does kind of make sense as it was pictured then. It was photographed the same night as one of my more successful pictures, Newbury Canal at Night. If I'm honest I would have liked to post something perhaps much more recent but as I stated earlier, time has just not made it easy. I used a couple of hours spare to process the Piccadilly picture on Saturday before heading to one of my mates Stag Do's in Southampton but other than that time has been spent purely on the property move. Until Thursday.....

The Red Café

French for the very beginners now, yes I know that Café Rouge is easily translated into Red Café. I thought it was perhaps a bit too obvious to simply call the picture Café Rouge. It is one of my ambitions in life to speak French though. Currently I'm learning Polish as I am marrying a Polish lady in September and getting married there too. But French is a language I've been learning since I was about 11 and can hardly speak a word of it still. It was the country that gave me my passion for photography though and I want to spend a lot more time there in the future.

This picture was taken nowhere near France however. In fact, only about 7 miles away from where I live, in the town mainly famous for Vodafone, Newbury. I like Newbury for it's ambition though, this restaurant is one of the latest venues to open up in the new and modern Parkway shopping centre, a development that has been many years in the making. I took this picture last Sunday evening and was one of the first new pictures I took in over a month. It is an HDR from the standard 3 shots and I'm very pleased how this one turned out. Now where's their number, there's got to be some money to be made here!......

The Path of History / Lightroom 4

Adobe Lightroom 4 has just been released and I have got my copy! I've said many times that Lightroom is my favourite photo-processing software and that remains the case. I'm always a bit reluctant when they bring a new version out of something that to me is already good, as they potentially change things they didn't need to. I was happy when I bought Nik Color Efex Pro 4 but there are things I don't like about it that I wished they had just left as they were in Nik Color Efex 3. Suffice to say, Lightroom 4 has not presented anything to me that isn't an improvement. All the new controls are great and they have created functions that work just like a charm. I should mention as well that it is half price at the moment, which means that if you are upgrading from Lightroom 3, it is only about £60 which is more than a good deal. In no particular order, here are my 5 favourite new functions of Lightroom 4:

* Shadows control - They have changed the top exposure sliders in the the develop panel, getting rid of brightness, recovery and fill light (and probably something else I'm forgetting) and created a more streamlined Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks. The new shadows function is the best shadow adjuster I have seen on any program. Rather than making changes to the whole picture, it uncannily manages to pick just the shadow area (you'll know what I mean when you play with this bar) and makes the changes simple and effective.

* Remove Chromatic Aberration - CA is a particular enemy of HDR photographers as the HDR process tends to amplify any CA in the picture. I spent many frustrating hours trying to correct CA using the old Lightroom 3 options which were to adjust the CA sliders until you felt it was right (this again inevitably affected the rest of the picture). Now however, there is a simple check box 'Remove Chromatic Aberration', it's brilliantly simple and it works. So easy, just like that, done. I love the person that created that switch.

* Single Colour Tone Curve - As well as using the tone curve to make general colour adjustments (RGB) you can individually select Red, Green or Blue and apply a tone curve for just that colour tone. This is great and gives some fantastic artistic effects to enhance mood. I used this function on the picture above by selecting a tone curve for the colour blue and dropping the shadow areas a bit to give it a more yellow and historic look.

* Clarity - The clarity slider has always been a bit of an insider's trick to make a picture look sharper and now it has been hugely improved. You wouldn't probably whack the slider all the way to the right but even if you did the effects are much less extreme but still effective. Many pictures can now have an abundance of clarity, without the addition of Halos. This will work great for single pictures and HDR's.

* Blurb Booksmart plugin - I used Blurb Booksmart to write my recent book 'West Berkshire in HDR' and now there is the option of creating any book directly in Lightroom. Brilliant.

I have watched many of the excellent Lightroom 4 tutorials on Adobe's Lightroom Youtube page and I cannot recommend them enough. This is something I need to do much more for Photoshop but watch the videos of the new Lightroom 4 and learn how it all works. A couple of hours spent watching the tutorials and your knowledge of Lightroom can more than double.

The Path of History

I chose to post this picture today as I have processed it almost entirely in Lightroom 4. It is a 3 shot HDR and apart from the Blurb plugin, I've used all the improvements listed above and many more to create this picture. It is of Donnington Castle (what's left anyway) in my hometown of Newbury, Berkshire. I did send this over to Photoshop for a bit of noise reduction and sharpening but as I said, this was largely worked in Lightroom.