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!