The Smugglers Inn

Recently, I have been experimenting with merging different exposure brackets together, without using Photomatix or any other tone mapping software. Particularly I have been using LR/Enthuse (somehow I had not heard of this before), which blends together multiple exposures in Lightroom, without the tone mapping process, allowing for a more clean image to be merged. The resulting photo needs to be further post-processed (as normal) but you can get a very pleasing result.

Now today's picture is not a merged image of any kind, it is from a single RAW file. I was planning to post a set of photos which had been either merged in Photomatix, LR/Enthuse or not at all, but I wasn't happy with any of the results, which probably says more for the picture I was trying, than the actual techniques. So that little experiment will have to wait, but in the meantime this is an image from Osmington on the Dorset south coast. I took this while staying in Sherborne recently, though of course we took a bit of a trip for the day to visit somewhere further afield in Dorset. I didn't actually take many pictures that day, largely because we had our dog let loose running around the south coast, but it was a lovely day nonetheless. This pub is a very popular spot around Osmington, probably because 'watering holes' are few and far between along this part of the Jurassic Coast. It's a fantastic little place though, full of character and charm. I actually did most of the post-processing work on a different picture in this set of brackets, but then copied them over in Lightroom to this version, and preferred this one ever so slightly more (was a bit sharper more than anything).

HalewoodPhoto.com

I have plugged on Facebook and Twitter recently my new interior design photography website HalewoodPhoto.com. It's more the business aspect to my photography, rather than the hobby side (which is this blog and HalewoodPhotographic.com), but nevertheless I will be blogging in the near future, some of my more favourite images from my interior design exploits. I welcome everybody to have a look at my new website and tell me what you think. Until next time...

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!

The King Charles Tavern

The great British pub.....A national institution up there with fish & chips in terms of essential British culture. Ok, there are many other things such as the royal family and getting over excited about our sporting potential that also define the British, but pubs are clearly important. I must confess, though I will never be a tee-totaller, I rarely find myself in one of these nowadays. I don't know if it's settling down or being fed up waking up completely unmotivated but I just prefer not to drink these days. I hope I don't sound too boring by those comments, as I said, I would never be a tee-totaller, I enjoy going for a drink like most people, it's just I enjoy it so much more when there's a real reason such as a celebration or people you haven't seen in a long time. I'm not a beer man either, my tipple is anything vodka-based because A) I like drinks with flavour, B) I can pretend I'm James Bond for a short time and C) it helps me get along fantastically well with the Polish when I visit there!

This pub is the King Charles Tavern, commonly known as the KC in Newbury. Tavern is a word used many hundreds of years before the word 'pub' (short for public house for the non-British) was invented. This HDR shot was taken from 4 different exposures and processed in Lightroom, Photomatix, Photoshop, Topaz Adjust, Viveza 2 and Nik Color Efex Pro, which I now realise was quite a lot of them.

Before I forget, hope you like the new look! More updates to come in the very near future!