The Swan Hotel, Bibury

Something a bit closer to home now....Amidst the plenty of pictures I still have to post from Miami and Egypt, I wanted to post this picture of rural Gloucestershire, that I have been working on recently. The picture was taken almost 2 years ago, during the summer of 2011. I was staying at this fantastic hotel in the village of Bibury, and had the evening to walk round with camera and tripod (something I did not use a lot back then), taking pictures of the local area.

I know it's been said many times, but using a tripod I think is perhaps the single most simple advice you can give someone for taking better pictures. Having used a tripod on the evening I took this picture, means I can still get great sharp images from them now, and come back to them with post-processing skills I have developed over time. I did create an HDR of this back then (not published on any website) and though I was already well into my HDR journey, looking back it was still probably over-processed (too saturated) and not at all well cropped!

This is a standard 3 shot HDR picture, processed in Lightroom, Photomatix, Photoshop and Nik Color Efex Pro. Most adjustments, dodging and burning and stuff was done in Lightroom, with some spot-healing done in Photoshop. When using Photomatix these days, I would recommend turning down the Luminosity slider (I used to always have this fully to the right by default). A lot of HDR pictures these days are presented as more realistic, rather than the over-cooked HDR look there used to be, and I think that has a lot to do with turning down the luminosity slider.

New post coming over the weekend!

The Autumn Way

Trees are in my opinion the hardest subject to introduce HDR techniques to. Even if you are picturing whilst on a tripod, it only takes a minute amount of movement by the branches or leaves of a tree to make the whole post-processing task a (photographic) nightmare. This can be rectified by producing 2 versions of an HDR (as I commonly do), a heavily anti-ghosted version and a non- ghosted version, and then combining the best elements of the 2, which in this case would include the non-moving parts of a tree. That doesn't always work but it helps a lot. Another problem with trees and HDRs though is the patches of bright exposure between the leaves and branches, which can be totally out of sync with the exposure of the bare sky in the rest of the picture. Photographers will probably know what I am talking about here.

Luckily, I did not seem to have many of those problems with today's picture. It was another picture I took from Westonbirt Arboretum at the weekend, and is the kind of picture I wanted to post on Tuesday, but just didn't have the time to do. This tree didn't move at all during the 5 bracketed exposures taken (only 3 were used for the final HDR) and I had very little problems with exposure as well. It is indeed a beautiful tree, though that is about as much information as I have on it. I am no expert on plants, trees, things that don't talk etc, and do not have the patience to go looking on the net for a tree that looks like this, just to know the name of it.